Engel, Richard

ORAL HISTORY OF RICHARD ENGEL
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 8, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December 8, 2011, and I am at the home of Mr. Richard Engel here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Engel, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MR. ENGEL: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you tell us about where you were born and raised, and something about your family, and let's start at the very beginning.
MR. ENGEL: All right. I was born in nominally Toledo, Ohio, but an area that is now incorporated as Oregon, Ohio. I went to grammar school and high school there; graduated from Clay High School. Attended the University of Toledo for four years. It was basically a commuter college at that time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and graduated in 1953.
MR. MCDANIEL: What year were you born?
MR. ENGEL: 1931.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1931, and what did your mom and dad do?
MR. ENGEL: Well, my father was a pipe fitter with Standard Oil Company of Ohio. Both my parents were immigrants from Germany. They had not met, of course, before they came to the U.S., but subsequently met and married and lived there for the rest of their lives.
MR. MCDANIEL: How old were they when they came to the U.S.?
MR. ENGEL: Well, let's see. My father came in 1922, so he would have been about 23 years old. My mother came in 1924, and she would have been 27 at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so they met in Cleveland, did you say?
MR. ENGEL: In Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: In Toledo. Excuse me.
MR. ENGEL: Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: In the Toledo area, and they set up a home and had you. Did they have --
MR. ENGEL: Well, actually, my mother came with her parents.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Her father had come earlier; her mother and she came later. There was sort of an unwritten rule back then that you went where you had family or friends or some kind of connections, and my grandmother's sister and some of her family was already living in Toledo, so it was a natural place for them to come.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: My father got there principally by chance, although there was a connection that's too detailed to go into.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, they both ended up in Toledo, anyway.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. ENGEL: I had one sister who was a year and a half older than I. She died about four years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were born, you said, in --
MR. ENGEL: '31.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- '31, so that was during the Depression.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me what you can remember about that.
MR. ENGEL: Well, not a whole lot. I remember that for a while -- well, my father worked for the New York Central Railroad prior to the Depression, and then lost his job, spent some time working on some of the public works activities that were instituted, I guess, by Roosevelt.
MR. MCDANIEL: The WPA or the CCC.
MR. ENGEL: -- which one, I don't remember --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- but it was in the Toledo area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- mostly razing old homes, and then was fortunate enough to get a job with Standard Oil, which made things considerably better, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. What did he do with Standard Oil?
MR. ENGEL: He was a pipe fitter --
MR. MCDANIEL: A pipe fitter. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and he did a little bit of moonlighting on the side for other people, and I was sort of his apprentice, or let's say step-and-fetch-it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- while he was doing things for people in their homes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, I had an early contact with things mechanical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was he trained as a pipe fitter, or did he --
MR. ENGEL: No, no.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- just pick it up? He just learned on the job?
MR. ENGEL: No, he had what at that time was customary for farmers, four years of formal education.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Of course, he went on and educated himself and they both became citizens as soon as --
MR. MCDANIEL: But he had that four years of education in Germany --
MR. ENGEL: -- yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- before he came to the U.S. Right. Why did they leave Germany?
MR. ENGEL: Well, the early '20s times were very difficult in Germany because of the reparation demands placed upon Germany at the end of World War I, and inflation was rampant, things were really bad in many ways --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so some people just left.
MR. MCDANIEL: They just left. Right, right. Okay, so you went to school there outside of Toledo --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and went to high school, and what was that like?
MR. ENGEL: Well, it was pretty much like any other high school. We were fortunate enough to be in a -- at that time, it was a township organization --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that was a fairly prosperous township, so we had a really good school system, very well-funded, very well staffed, and it was a good place to go to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure Toledo at that time was very industrial --
MR. ENGEL: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so would you say kind of that whole area was blue collar?
MR. ENGEL: It was certainly blue collar. Now, Oregon Township was mostly farming community.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: There were, however, four oil refineries within the township, which provided a convenient tax base --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- for real estate taxes, which funded everything in the township.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand. I understand. Well, that's good. So, you graduated high school, and then you went to college --
MR. ENGEL: College at the University of Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you said it was basically a commuter college.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. There were some dormitories there, and before I graduated, they had built three relatively good-sized dormitories. It has now greatly expanded to well over 20,000 students.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. ENGEL: There were about 5,000 students there when I was going to school there, and a lot of them were going on the GI Bill at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, because this was after the war was over.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you study there?
MR. ENGEL: Chemical engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I went in thinking I was going to go into chemical engineering, and I got a degree in chemical engineering --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- bachelor's, BS.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Any particular reason that interested you?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had been interested in chemistry, and because of my background with my father, and my grandfather was a master mechanic, he was a master machinist, I should say --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- worked in the tool and die business in Toledo, which at that time Toledo provided a lot of support to the auto industry --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the Willis Overland Company was in Toledo, which ended up making the Jeeps in World War II --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- or World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, there was a lot of industry within Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But with the mechanical background from both sides, I just ended up in engineering as opposed to pure chemistry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. So, you graduated from there. What year did you graduate --
MR. ENGEL: 1953 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 1953.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, at that time, well, shortly before I graduated, I learned about this program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- ORSORT. In fact, for the two previous years, students from Toledo had been admitted to ORSORT as students. It was a pretty selective program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I was fortunate enough to be chosen that year, and there was yet another from the university that was chosen the following year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- coincidentally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But it was recognized as the premiere school for nuclear reactor technology --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- at that time. Now, there were programs at North Carolina and at Penn State in nuclear engineering, but the system, or the program in Oak Ridge had access to what then was classified technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, you might as well come to the place where it all started, you know?
MR. ENGEL: Well, of course all of that technology has long since been declassified --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- primarily during the Geneva Conferences that took place in the middle '50s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But it was a good place to go. There were 80 students in that class.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you came there after you graduated or --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- okay, after you graduated.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, I graduated in June, moved down here in September --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- spent my first night at the Alexander Hotel, as a matter of fact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: We were nominally employees of Union Carbide --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- although we were paid probably somewhat less than the going monthly salary for bachelor degree engineers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, because you were going to school.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, and you went to ORSORT for a year, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was a year program.
MR. ENGEL: One-year program. Finished up sometime toward the end of August the following year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, as a part of that program, were you guaranteed a job?
MR. ENGEL: I was not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was handled very much like any university would be handled. They brought people in to make presentations, people they were interested in. We were invited on interview trips to places like Pittsburgh for Westinghouse, Schenectady for GE. I went on a couple of interview trips, and I had a couple of other job offers, as well as one from the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well now, when you were a student at ORSORT -- tell me a little bit about that program. Tell me what you remember about it, and my understanding is the professors or instructors, most of them were from the Lab --
MR. ENGEL: They were.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and they were experts in their field.
MR. ENGEL: They were, indeed, and some of them were pioneers in their fields. What at the time seemed elderly lady to me in Health Physics was Elda Anderson --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- who was very well known in that field and the radiation shielding was -- oh, I can't think of his name right now. It'll come to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. ENGEL: But then, the people who taught reactor theory class, for example, subsequently wrote a textbook on the subject.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Other people wrote other textbooks. Everitt P. Blizard was the shielding person. He also, I think, wrote a textbook on that subject.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: So, we were in the midst of things. The program was very intense. I never worked so hard as a student in all my life --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- before or since, and I heard that from a great many of the people there. There were two categories of students. There were those who were Category, I think, A, who were not sponsored by a company, and then there was Category B, which was people who were sent by their sponsoring company --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which might have been, well, some from the Navy Department, one fellow was Air Force, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, in fact, and a lot from what was then AEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But there were 40 in each category, but there were students from all over the country, a couple of friends from Caltech, one had an MS in physics from Chicago, so I, with my piddling BS degree, was sort of at the low end of the scale.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But everybody agreed that it was a more intensive education program than they had faced before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, was it co-ed? Were there women in the class?
MR. ENGEL: There were none --
MR. MCDANIEL: There were none?
MR. ENGEL: -- and I don't know the reason for that except, just guessing, that nobody bothered to apply.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But let's face it, nearly 60 years ago there was less emphasis on equality in those areas.
MR. MCDANIEL: There may just not have been a lot of women in that field, you know, yet, at that point.
MR. ENGEL: That's probably also true.
MR. MCDANIEL: Probably true. Now, where did you live when you were going to school?
MR. ENGEL: I lived in one of the dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. ENGEL: Back then, if you were single and didn't have any special connections, you were assigned a room in a dormitory, and it was one of the H-shaped dormitories. You may recall there were two. There were the S-shaped ones and the H-shaped, and it was just down the hill from -- oh, what's the one on top of the hill? Is it Cambridge? Anyway, it was Carlisle Hall was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Carlisle. Carlisle Hall. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Of course, it was like dormitories of that time. You had your room, which was about ten feet long, maybe eight feet wide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The shower and bathroom facilities were in the middle part of the H.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Those dormitories had cooking facilities of a sort in there, but I never made use of those.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, where did you go to eat?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, any number of the restaurants in the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Cafeterias were still being operated at that point.
MR. ENGEL: There were. The T&C Cafeteria, which was where The Soup Kitchen is now, was in operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: The Mayflower, across the street from there, was in operation. The China Wok, which is in that area, was in operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Let's see. I'm trying to think. Of course, the --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was the Snow White there yet?
MR. ENGEL: The Snow White was there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I tried to avoid the Snow White as much as I could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why, because it was busy, or because the food wasn't very good?
MR. ENGEL: Well, the food didn't appeal to me, and that's primarily the reason.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it very southern? Is that what it was?
MR. ENGEL: Well, it was kind of greasy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, kind of -- right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that's something that I wasn't accustomed to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But mostly, in restaurants, of course the Oak Terrace was there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Probably couldn't afford to go to it very often --
MR. ENGEL: Well, we weren't short of money. I mean my pay was something over $300.00 a month, which wasn't bad for 1953 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so I could afford to eat, and the dorm cost -- I'm thinking it was like $40.00 a month rent is the sort of thing I remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you did your year at ORSORT?
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was it located?
MR. ENGEL: There was a building within the ORNL main X-10 area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- toward the west end of the plant. At that time, as you came in the gate at the west end, you came in the gate, the first building on the right as you came in was the fire hall --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the fire department, and there was a building on the left that was right along the fence, which was used as office space by the school staff and by some of the students. Everybody was assigned space in an "office."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: But then, the next building on the left, which has been demolished within the last couple of years, was the ORSORT building, and, as I understand it, that building was built in the very early '50s, like '51 or so, for that purpose.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: The main central part of the building was basically a lecture hall. It was a one-story wooden structure. But the lectures were delivered there, chalkboards across the front, and there was literally chalkboards back then, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, of course.
MR. ENGEL: Some office spaces on both sides of that room, but then the chemistry lab was up on the hill. A lot of the physics lab work was done at the Graphite Reactor Building.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you did lots of things around the site --
MR. ENGEL: around the site --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the X-10 site.
MR. ENGEL: -- but primarily at the west side of the facility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We didn't have much occasion to go to the east side of the facility where the 4500 Building was located. Even the medical facility at that time was in a building just east of the school building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, you were officially employees of Union --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Carbide, and you were treated as such.
MR. ENGEL: As such, and, in fact, that year went on my employee record as a year of seniority.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Well, good. So, you came to the end of that year, you learned a lot, you worked hard --
MR. ENGEL: Oh, I think I knew everything at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you learned a lot, you worked hard, and you came to the end of that year; tell me what happened.
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had, as I said, a couple offers for employment, one of which was from ORNL in the Chemical Technology Division. Floyd Culler was Division Director at that time, and I'm sure that's a name you know well --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I decided that the work I would be doing there was more chemically oriented than the kind of work I would have been doing for Westinghouse or GE. GE, at that time, was working hard on the sodium cooled system for the submarine, and Westinghouse, of course, was working on the Nautilus Project --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which evolved into all their power reactor work, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But it just had more appeal to me at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, you graduated from that program, and then you went to work --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right here in Oak Ridge.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and the one thing that I remember well about that, for the last three months before we finished at the end of August, we had moved into an E-2 apartment building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Back then, the schoolteachers all left town. The schoolteachers were fortunate. They could have an apartment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- if there were two, or three, or four of them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we had made contact with a group, one of whom now lives across the street from us, to sublet their E-2, two-bedroom apartment for the summer --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was a benefit to them, they didn't have to give up the apartment, and we could move out of the dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so who was we, you and --
MR. ENGEL: We and a couple of other ORSORT students.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. So, you sublet the apartment?
MR. ENGEL: Right, and the one condition I put on taking a job here was, "I will take the job if you can get me an apartment as opposed to a dormitory room --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the next day, I had a one-bedroom brick apartment --
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. ENGEL: -- available.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were tired of dormitory rooms, weren't you?
MR. ENGEL: I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yes. Well, good. Well, good. So, you got the apartment and you were working, and so tell me a little bit about your work and what you did over the years.
MR. ENGEL: Well, at that time, I was in the Chemical Technology Division, and one of the programs ongoing was the Aqueous Homogenous Reactor Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now tell me what that means.
MR. ENGEL: All right. It is a reactor concept that employs uranium sulfate as a fuel dissolved in heavy water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and circulating as a liquid fuel through the core, out to a heat exchanger, where one could generate, nominally, electricity and then back in.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, the uranium sulfate was dissolved in the water?
MR. ENGEL: Right --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is very different from the solid fuel concept, where you have fuel that's clad with something, most notoriously now zircaloy, which is not a pleasant material.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was a concept that was brought about -- it was E.P. Wigner and Weinberg who came up with the concept --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and Alvin Weinberg used to describe it as a pot, a pipe, and a pump --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which basically is what it was, but there's an infinite variety of stuff that goes with it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, but fundamentally that's what it was.
MR. ENGEL: Fundamentally, that's what it was, and it was a very good concept. It did have its limitations --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and was subsequently abandoned. While I was going to school at ORSORT, the first Homogeneous Reactor experiment was operated at ORNL in Melton Valley, which is the valley just south of the main ORNL area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- X-10 area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was more or less successful, and so the decision was made, "Let's go on with the next experiment," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was dubbed the HRT, Homogeneous Reactor Test. The first one was HRE, Homogeneous Reactor Experiment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: One of the ideas associated with that is that fission products are largely insoluble in this liquid tend to precipitate form solid material in the fuel, and if you can separate these out, you have much less loss of neutrons to fission products, and hence a more effective breeding concept, because one neutron is required to keep the fission process going, and then, if you're going to breed, you need one neutron to make the next fuel item --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and a few to lose and scatter around, and if you lose too many of the fission products, you have lost your breeding potential.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: So, the idea was, we will take a side-stream of this salt, run it through a very, very small centrifugal separator to separate out the solid fission product particles --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and these little separators were called hydroclones, a quarter inch in diameter and about that long --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- inside diameter, and you would pump the liquid through there fairly fast, the solids would separate and go down to a tank at the bottom --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- where they could be taken out and the clarified liquid would go back into the system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, by this time, the centrifuge technology was pretty -- I mean, you know, it was very useable, I mean, you know, for --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, the centrifugal.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, the --
MR. ENGEL: The centrifugal process. Now, these were not centrifuges --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right.
MR. ENGEL: -- per se, because it's a stationary little item there, and the separation force comes from bringing the liquid in tangentially so that it swirls.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Just like you've seen these vacuum cleaner ads for the --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- centrifugal separation process.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: It's the same principle --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that was to be a part of the second Homogeneous Reactor Experiment, and, in fact, it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: That system was built in the same building as HRE 1 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and was under construction shortly after I came to work, but I was involved in the development of these little cone-shaped hydroclones --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- along with other people, of course --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they worked very nicely, except the reactor wasn't all that successful, for a variety of other reasons.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: That was not the limiting consideration.
MR. MCDANIEL: But one of the main things that the Lab was doing at the time was experimenting and developing different types of reactors.
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was just one of the --
MR. ENGEL: That was one of them.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- one of them.
MR. ENGEL: The other one that was going on, on a more or less parallel course was the Aircraft Reactor Experiment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was about 200 yards up the road --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- from the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor Experiment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and I guess the ultimate goal for the Aircraft Reactor was to get it small enough and light enough to work.
MR. ENGEL: And with enough power intensity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- to be able to drive an airplane --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- except that people finally came to the realization, or I guess the question, "Do we really want that mass of radioactive material flying around over our heads?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly, exactly, and the politicians decided, "No," didn't they?
MR. ENGEL: Well, yeah, it was decided “no” for a variety of reasons.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I understand. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But that Aircraft Reactor Experiment became the forerunner of a subsequent reactor that I'm sure we'll get into later --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but let's finish up with --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, let's --
MR. ENGEL: -- the Aqueous System.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, right.
MR. ENGEL: Well, I spent some time on that, and the HRE 2 -- HRT, we called it then -- was moving toward operational state. The construction was well underway, and they decided they were going to need some people to operate this little processing facility at the reactor, and so they said, "Gee, you ought to learn about this reactor system if you're going to be involved in the chemical processing end of it," and so I moved over to the Y-12 area, where some of the experimental facilities for ORNL were located at that time, one of which was a large, high-pressure, high-temperature pumped water loop pumping uranyl sulfate solution. Worked there for a while, and then they decided they really needed some operators for this reactor, and so I was put on loan from the Chemical Technology Division to what was then the Reactor Experimental Engineering Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was called REED, R-E-E-D --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which came about, and that moved me back over to ORNL but into Melton Valley at the reactor site about the time they were training people for reactor operation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I became involved in the operation of that reactor, and worked on shift. There was around-the-clock operation, so I worked as a Shift Engineer and then Shift Supervisor for a couple of years on that project. As the reactor was being put through its preliminary paces to check out, "Is it working? What's not working? What do we have to do? What do we have to fix?" and of course in any new project, there's a good bit of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: Then, it went into operation and appeared to be going along very successfully, and then what I choose to call the Achilles' Heel of the project made itself known. In order to be successful as a power reactor, you need to be able to produce steam at a reasonably high temperature.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Now, for a Pressurized Water Reactor, that temperature is of the order of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and in the HRE program, we were talking in centigrade, which is in the neighborhood of 300 degrees C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, we said, "Okay, this reactor has to operate at least a maximum temperature of 300 degrees C." The low temperature would be lower than that, but you have to get up to 300.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Well, uranyl sulfate solution in water, be it heavy water or ordinary water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- has an unpleasant property in that it separates into two liquid phases at something above 340 degrees C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, from 300 to 340 is not all that much margin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: This, in fact, appears to be what happened within the HRT. The HRT core, and this reactor consisted of a central core that was about 32 inches in diameter zircaloy vessel, conical at the bottom, with up-flow of the fuel solution --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- through the core. It's inside a roughly five-foot diameter pressure vessel that was stainless steel lined that contained a, at that time, reflector of just heavy water.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Was intended, ultimately, that that blanket would contain thorium oxide in a slurry, and so one would use the fission process in the core, let the neutrons run out to the blanket region and produce U-233 from thorium in the blanket, which could then be separated out, recycled back into the core --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so you have a breeder. And, at that time, the name of the game was breeding. I mean if you didn't have a reactor that could breed, you didn't have a reactor that was acceptable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, and just so people will know, breeding means to produce energy, to produce another --
MR. ENGEL: To produce more fuel --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- produce more fuel. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- than you consume.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: The breakeven point, you produce one atom for every atom that is consumed in the fission process. Now, not every one of those consumed atoms has produced fission.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: Some of them are non-productive --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- but whatever you burn up, you have to replace --
MR. MCDANIEL: You have to replace.
MR. ENGEL: -- in some way --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the idea, and it was heavily touted by the liquid metal fast breeder reactors, the sodium cooled system, was that they could produce a lot more surplus fuel, and any surplus is then made available to start up a new reactor when you build up enough stuff --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the claim then was that you could have a doubling time of five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- which meant that you could produce enough excess fuel to not only keep your reactor running, but to start up a new one every five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is really remarkable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: The Sodium-cooled Aqueous System, now that was a system operating on U-235 breeding plutonium.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was done in the '50s?
MR. ENGEL: Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is the late '50s, I guess, is when this --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- project was going on.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and the Aqueous System was based on thorium and uranium 233, as opposed to plutonium as a fissile material --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the potential for breeding gain is much smaller there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, even if you have a highly efficient system, you can't really compete, in principle, with the fast breeder reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- although the claim was that it's a much more stable system, you don't have to worry about the short neutron lifetimes and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- maintaining control of a fast reactor, which is a challenging task. At any rate --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were working on that project?
MR. ENGEL: -- we were working on that project. As I said, I was one of the shift engineers and then became shift supervisor, and as we were raising the system on its initial rise to full power, which was intended to be five megawatts, 5,000 kilowatts, something untoward happened and the system was shut down rather quickly. I happened to be on duty at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: That was my shift that this happened on --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was subsequently discovered that, apparently, some of this phase separation had occurred, some of this heavy phase, which was very concentrated in uranium, had somehow settled on the side of this, about one-centimeter-thick zirconium wall --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and burned a hole in it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Burned a hole in it.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so the -- well, it melted a hole in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: It was not really a burning process --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- per se --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so we got uranium solution into this otherwise clean blanket system, which made all the instruments say funny things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Who was I talking to the other day? I was interviewing a fellow, and this may have been the same situation, but he was talking about it burned a hole in it. Dick? What was his name? Anyway, I don't remember, but I think he was talking about the same situation.
MR. ENGEL: It may very well have been. It wasn't Dick Huntley, was it?
MR. MCDANIEL: No, it was a fellow; he lives out in Rarity Bay now. Maybe it wasn't Dick. Anyway, so --
MR. ENGEL: Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so, you had to shut it down --
MR. ENGEL: -- we had to shut down --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- all of a sudden.
MR. ENGEL: -- and figure out what happened, and this is before the days of closed-circuit television and all these other things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: There were two access ports into this system. One was into the reactor core through a flange at the top of that, and then off to the side was another access port into the blanket region --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the people who did the mechanical design developed a system that would go down from about 15 feet above it, down through this access port, erect an arm to the side in this blanket region, in the annular space between two vessels --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- erect an arm, and then erect another arm that went over this way, and then look through a mirror at the backside --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- where the hole was.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you had to put a camera down there to look?
MR. ENGEL: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, no? No, no.
MR. ENGEL: No camera. We had a telescope --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- up on the top level looking into a mirror at the top to a mirror at the bottom, to a mirror here, to another mirror there --
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- to look at this thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see, so it was just reflections --
MR. ENGEL: Just pure reflections, and then they devised a scheme for taking an impression of the hole, making a patch to fit it, and installing a patch. All of this is done in a very highly radioactive environment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- working down through the shield box. The whole system was underground --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and there was about five feet of concrete shielding in two layers above the reactor system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so there was a port about this big that had a plug in it that could be removed and everything went down through that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it was very, I mean it was fairly difficult to do anything inside there.
MR. ENGEL: Oh, it was terribly difficult --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the people who devised the equipment and put it into operation did a remarkable job.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, how long did it take for that process to happen, to diagnose and repair, and all that?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, a couple of months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Back then, we didn't have multiple layers of review and evaluation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and safety analysis, and design reviews --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and procedural reviews. It was very much easier to do anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. You just kind of said, "This is what we think is gonna work, so let's go make it happen," generally.
MR. ENGEL: They were reviewed from a safety standpoint --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- "Are you doing anything that is unsafe?" Now, from the standpoint of, "Is it going to be successful?" you didn't have to guarantee success --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- because if that failed, you could try something else.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: In the current climate, you don't even start until you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to be successful --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was much more challenging.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I'm sure. So, after that project, what did you move on to?
MR. ENGEL: Well, that project continued until, oh, late 1959, 1960. I moved out of the operations end into an office job, which was looking at the data, analyzing data, evaluating performance, and things of that sort --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- as opposed to the operations side, and then my particular career was interrupted by about ten months. By that time, the ORSORT program had evolved to an international program, and there were a lot of international students at ORSORT --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- one of whom was from Germany, and the Germans had purchased a small 50-kilowatt research reactor, a liquid fuel uranyl sulfate in water that was marketed by, I think it was Atomics International that marketed them and installed them around the world in various places as research facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: They were very small. They operated well below the boiling temperature of the water, primarily to serve as sources of neutrons to be used for physics experiments, chemical experiments, making tracer elements to use, and things of that sort.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: This organization, newly established in Berlin, called the Hahn-Meitner Institute for Nuclear Research, had bought one --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the supplier provided it, installed it, and said, "Okay, there you are."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: So, they said, "Gee, we'd like to have someone who's had a little bit of experience come over, and we think we know what we're doing, but we want somebody to sort of hold our hand --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- while we go through the initial stages of operation," and I was fortunate enough to be selected for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how did that selection process -- were they working with the Lab, or did they just call the Lab and say --
MR. ENGEL: Well, this one fellow was a student at ORSORT --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, I see, that's right. That's right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and he was going to be the manager for the operations group for this reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so he approached Laboratory management and said, "Is there somebody that we could borrow?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: They would pay the salary and expenses of whoever came over there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- if the Lab would provide somebody to go over --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they were looking for somebody who had been involved in the Aqueous Homogeneous Project, and I happened to be the one that got picked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and probably somebody who knew something about Germany, or German, or could speak German. Could you speak German?
MR. ENGEL: I could speak German after a fashion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- because --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. I can speak English after a fashion, so ...
MR. ENGEL: - well, this is important, because the German that I could speak was totally different from the educated German that was spoken by professionals --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- in Berlin --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- because my father was a farmer, my mother had some education, but they spoke a dialect, which is peculiar to southwest Germany --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and while I had to speak German to my grandparents because they wanted me to learn German, not because they couldn't speak English --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the German that I learned was the southwest German dialect --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is a very casual German --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- compared to the formal German that is used in professional circles in Berlin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, yes, I could speak German and I could understand very well, but it's like somebody coming out of the hills in Windrock and trying to speak to some of the PhD scientists at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. So, you went there for, what did you say, ten months, a year?
MR. ENGEL: Nearly a year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Nearly a year, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- with a new wife.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was going to ask, you met your wife. I want to come back to that. So, you went there for a year, and you helped them get started.
MR. ENGEL: Right, and then came back and finished up writing some of the final reports on the Aqueous System --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and about that time, there was a -- and I don't remember how the decision was made exactly but it was made in Washington. There were three concepts going for a Fluid Fuel System, and three that were primary contenders.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: One was the Aqueous System, one was the Molten Salt System, which was an outgrowth of the Aircraft Reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the third one was a Liquid Bismuth System circulating a slurry of thorium oxide that was proposed by Brookhaven National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were other fluid fuel systems that had been proposed, and I say fluid as opposed to liquid because one of them was actually a gas system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was being proposed, as I recall, by Georgia Tech. But there was something convened, and there's a book written about that thick, on these three concepts, and the decision was made that the Molten Salt System was judged to be the one most likely to be successful as a power-producing system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so all effort was directed to that system, and the Liquid Bismuth System and the Aqueous System were dropped --
MR. MCDANIEL: Were dropped.
MR. ENGEL: -- from AEC's program at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now, was the Lab, were they already doing a Molten Salt?
MR. ENGEL: They were.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so they were already doing that. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: They were building on the experience from the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, which was a Molten Salt System.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: So, based on that, they were moving ahead with the design, and were well along with the design because, as I say, they competed successfully in this --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- system, and so I got moved over to the Molten Salt System. When I went in, they were well along with some of the core design, but I was involved in some of the analysis of the core design, safety analysis, things of that sort, and then, as construction moved along, I moved over to the reactor site and we did the planning of the experimental program for the reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the training program for the operators, the implementation for the computerized data gathering system. That was the first reactor that I know of that had a computer installed, and it filled the space about the size of this room --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- to collect data automatically without having the operators go around and read this instrument, read this instrument. We still did a lot of that, but there was a system developed and put in place to let the computer gather a lot of data and make a lot of calculations with that data --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I was involved in the preparation of that system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: That computer was built by a company in California, and the build schedule for the MSRE -- Molten Salt Reactor Experiment -- was just about the same as the build schedule for Bull Run Steam Plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and, in fact, both TVA at Bull Run and ORNL at the MSRE contracted to buy the same computer system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, after MSRE was shut down, a number of the things were shipped over to TVA to use as spare parts on their --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- computer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, was the Molten Salt Reactor, was it located down in Melton Valley?
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: The history of the Aircraft Reactor was involved in this because the ARE, the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, was operated in an underground cell in a particular building, Building 7503, which is irrelevant, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- at the other end of that building, they had made an excavation and installed a cylindrical tank, which was intended to be the containment vessel for the Aircraft Reactor Test --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the nominally 60-megawatt reactor, which has been variously called a fireball reactor, which you have probably heard of, it was a beryllium reflector moderated system, about this diameter, and for a long time there was a big hunk of that beryllium that stayed in one of the Reactor Division buildings at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: And they had made the excavation for and installed this big tank, which had a hemispherical head on the bottom and a hemispherical head on top. Then, when the Aircraft Reactor Program was cancelled, we said, "Well, we've got this building, we're going to build a Molten Salt Reactor, so we'll just put it there."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We had to make some modifications. We had to cut off the hemispherical head at the top and put a flat top on it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and remove some extra stuff and provided a cell for the drain tank, and what have you --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but the design was going ahead on modifying that building in the early '60s period, after the Aircraft Program was cancelled, which was about 1959 or 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask a question, and this may sound silly but it's something I'm sure other people -- so, these things were underground. Why were they underground? Was it the shielding?
MR. ENGEL: It was shield -- well, you either stack up a bunch of shielding around it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then put a lid on it, which means if you want to work remotely, you have to climb up here to do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- or you dig a hole and put it in the ground and work from ground level --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- down in a hole --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is easier to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's easier to do.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and you have all the ground shielding now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and the ground shielded it pretty well.
MR. ENGEL: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I mean there was actually a second layer of containment outside of that, which had shielding installed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- in it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and all the things that went in that went through the sides, had to go through two layers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and there were other places, but everything was heavily shielded from the outside.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: But we had a flat top so that you could work from above.
MR. MCDANIEL: Work from ground level, okay. Okay, so the Molten Salt Reactor, you worked on that project.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and that went on, and there we did the planning. I always had a small group of people working on the analysis of the operation, the nuclear and mechanical analysis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The chemistry was under somebody else's domain --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- although we had to keep up with it, and there was a lot of chemical activity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was there?
MR. ENGEL: -- on that.
MR. MCDANIEL: But by now, you had had so much experience that you didn't concentrate on the chemical aspect of it, I mean, you know, you --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. Well, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you had learned so much about the other aspects of it.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. We were doing the nuclear behavior --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- how much fuel are we burning, are we seeing the kind of nuclear characteristics that people calculated, put the reactor through its paces with perturbations here, perturbations there, things of that sort.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now, at this point in time, late '50s, early '60s --
MR. ENGEL: This is middle '60s.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- middle '60s --
MR. ENGEL: The reactor achieved criticality in June of 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: Prior to that was all the installation, the checkout, the non-nuclear testing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and all this sort of stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was Oak Ridge, I mean was the Lab at that point -- I'm sure there were other people around the country and around the world that were doing this type of work, too, but was the Lab, I guess, far ahead of the curve as far as what they were doing?
MR. ENGEL: So far as I know, nobody else was much interested in liquid fuel systems.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: There was, in this group in Berlin, some interest in following what was going on, but so far as I know, nobody had an Active Development Program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: As we moved on, interest evolved in places like India, where because of their large thorium resource, were interested in a thorium U-233 cycle --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it looked like the Molten Salt concept was the most likely to be successful --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- on that, and so they sent people over to see what's going on, and we had a couple of people from India who worked with us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: People in Taiwan had an interest. We had Taiwanese who worked with us for a while, and others, but they had no programs of their own.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. So, in '65, it went critical --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and how did that work out?
MR. ENGEL: It worked out very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was almost, I would say, phenomenally successful for a first experiment. Now, there were problems.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: There were things that didn't go right, and valves that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second.
MR. ENGEL: Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. I lost your microphone for a second.
MR. ENGEL: I'm sorry. I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no, no, it wasn't you, I don't think. Okay, so valves that --
MR. ENGEL: You know, valves got plugged with oil vapors and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- things of that sort, things that had to be fixed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but nothing -- we liked to call them showstoppers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: There were no showstoppers in the system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Okay, so what did you do after that? Did you stay with that reactor program?
MR. ENGEL: Now, that particular program went on -- well, in '68 we said, "Okay, we've seen what we want to see with U-235. Let's take out the U-235 and put in U-233," which will be the ultimate fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: And how do you get U-233?
MR. ENGEL: You neutron-eradiate thorium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: You absorb a neutron in thorium. Thorium is 232.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: You put in a neutron and it becomes thorium 233, which decays quickly to protactinium 233, which then subsequently decays to uranium 233.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Scary enough, I understood that, so ...
MR. ENGEL: And this particular U-233, I'm not sure where it came from.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: It may have come from Savannah River for all I know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But we do know that Admiral Rickover had a program going in one of his water cooled reactors in Shippingsport, where he put some thorium in that reactor and produced some 233. He was going to have a light-water breeder --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which didn't work out, but they made some U-233 in that reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But, as I say, I don't think that's the -- what did I do with my handkerchief?
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. So, they took the U-235 out --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and they were going to replace it, and in '68 decided, "Well, let's put U-233 in there."
MR. ENGEL: Right, and one of the things we liked to brag about is that the process of removing the uranium 235 from a pot full of molten salt, very highly radioactive, we'd treat the stuff with gaseous fluorine, which converts the uranium that's in there as UF4 to UF6, and the UF6 comes off as a vapor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: You trap out the fission products and you catch the UF6 in containers about this big full of sodium iodide crystals --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and these things were clean enough, the uranium was so well decontaminated, that you could handle them in direct contact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Is that right? This may just show my ignorance again; how enriched was it, I suppose --
MR. ENGEL: Okay, well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- percentage?
MR. ENGEL: - for this reactor, we were not concerned with that. We had access to whatever enrichment we wanted --
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we operated the reactor first with depleted uranium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- just to say, "Will it run? Will something terrible happen if we try to heat this stuff up and circulate it?" Everything went well --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- without about one percent by weight of uranium, mostly U-238 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- in the system, and said, "All right, now we want to get into critical operation," and so we put in highly enriched uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: This is basically weapons grade stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: But what happened is it dilutes down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was about 35 percent U-235 when we were operating.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right. So, it will dilute down from the highly enriched --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to a much lower enrichment.
MR. ENGEL: That's what it took to make this particular experiment critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: From a chemistry standpoint, it doesn't care if it's 233, 235, 238.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: The chemical behavior is the same.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: The only difference is that with enough U-235, you could have a critical reaction going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly, exactly.
MR. ENGEL: So, this stuff came out, and I think it was sent back up to Ohio and put back into the -- it was so clean; they could put it directly back into the diffusion cascade.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: And then, we loaded up on U-233, and I'm thinking October of '68 is when we went critical with --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- 233.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: And then it operated until December 12, 1969.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: It was shut down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then we --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you stay with the program?
MR. ENGEL: I'm still with the program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: We're still finishing up the analysis of the performance, writing the final reports --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and starting work, and a lot of people were working on the next generation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- "What's it gonna be? How big will it be? What will be its design characteristics?"
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the ultimate goal? I mean what did people look at and say, "Okay, 20 years from now, this is gonna be used for what?"
MR. ENGEL: Generating electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: We're going to build plants that generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity per plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Nuclear power plants, that's what the idea for this was for.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely, and making if not enough uranium on the side to keep it going in the breeding process --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- almost enough --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- so that you had to bring in very little material from outside --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right --
MR. ENGEL: -- to keep it going.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to keep it going. So, let me ask you a question. Today, what are most reactors? What type of reactors, power plant reactors? What are they?
MR. ENGEL: They are solid fuel, zirconium zircaloy clad --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- light water reactor moderated and cooled. That water either boils and makes steam directly, or the hot water is piped to a heat exchanger, which is a steam generator, and then that steam goes to the turbine. The GE concept, the boiling water reactors, are the ones at Fukushima.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: The Westinghouse reactors are the pressurized water reactors --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- principally. There are other people who make these reactors, as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: The French use pressurized water reactors --
MR. MCDANIEL: Do they? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and nearly all of the power reactors in the world are water cooled reactors, light water reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, with fuel cells, I mean I guess fuel rods?
MR. ENGEL: Fuel rods.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fuel rods that go -- right.
MR. ENGEL: These rods are, oh, maybe that diameter --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and in bundles of this many, and the unpleasant property that they have is that the zirconium cladding, when it gets hot, reacts with water and breaks down the water and makes hydrogen --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which then can explode --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. ENGEL: -- and this is the sort of thing that happened at Fukushima --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and made a big mess of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Okay, so the Molten Salt Reactor Program was shut down in '69.
MR. ENGEL: Well, the Reactor was shut down.
MR. MCDANIEL: The Reactor. That's what I mean, the Reactor was shut down.
MR. ENGEL: The program continued with the intent of building another one, and then about February, I think it was, of 1972, word came down from Washington, "This program is shut down."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: "Stop."
MR. MCDANIEL: Stop, just quit.
MR. ENGEL: Quit.
MR. MCDANIEL: How come?
MR. ENGEL: I don't know. I have to be careful here.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MR. ENGEL: I have no information to answer your question.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I answered that question once with, "I don't know," and it came out sounding like I was puzzled that they would do something so foolish --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I --
MR. ENGEL: -- and I couldn't understand it.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But I have no basis for saying that it was this reason or that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- reason, or anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: It was a decision that was made in Washington --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so I moved over to the Gas Cooled Reactor Program for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: In the meantime, Senator Baker was active in Washington, and he somehow convinced the people in, I guess was it -- when did DOE come into play? It was either '66 or '76 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I'm --
MR. ENGEL: -- and I'm thinking '76.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- was it '76? Okay. I don't know.
MR. ENGEL: But either one, he convinced them that this program ought to be restarted --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that it would be restarted and funding would be assured until you've finished a successful program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: That lasted two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, not hardly enough time to get going.
MR. ENGEL: Well, we did accomplish a few things in that time related to the program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- that were, I think, important. But then, in 1976, they said, "Quit. You're done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were some other studies that went on beyond that until about 1980 on -- well, one of them was the -- get the title right -- the Non-Proliferating Alternative Systems Assessments Program --
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- NASAP --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they looked at half a dozen concepts for systems that would be more proliferation-resistant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- than the uranium plutonium fast breeder system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one that was considered was a molten salt system, and so we worked on a couple of concepts that we thought looked really pretty good, and wrote reports on those and these things went into various evaluations and got, essentially, ignored.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly. So, this was mid '70s, by this time.
MR. ENGEL: Late '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Late '70s. Now, what about the Clinch River Breeder Reactor? Now, tell me about that.
MR. ENGEL: I can tell you very little about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and what time was that going on?
MR. ENGEL: It was going on at about the same time, in the early '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were some people that left this program and went up to Chicago to work on the Breeder in the mid to late '60s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, I am terrible with dates and I can't tell you when the Clinch River Breeder was stopped --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- because that was, "Them other guys."
MR. MCDANIEL: That was those other guys. That was those other guys. I understand. All right, so they stopped your program, and then what did you do?
MR. ENGEL: Well, then I was out of a job, in a sense, except that there was a need in the fossil energy program for somebody to work with the director of that program tracking the technical aspects of the program, so I became a technical assistant in that program for three or four years. That started in 1980 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then, the fellow who was Technical Assistant to Murray Rosenthal decided he was going to leave. Murray wanted a Technical Assistant, and he tapped me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did Murray Rosenthal -- what was his title?
MR. ENGEL: He was then Associate Director for -- what was the official title? I can't give you the official title, but he was concerned with the reactor programs, the fusion energy program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- the engineering technology programs at the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: He was in that job, Chet Richmond was in the Biological Sciences, Alex Zucker was in the Physical Sciences --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I think Clyde Hopkins may have been operations --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he?
MR. ENGEL: -- at that time, but it was in that general timeframe --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then, subsequently, when Trivelpiece came on as Director of the Laboratory, Murray moved to Deputy Director --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I became Technical Assistant to the Deputy Director.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I just moved with him to another office --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly, exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that lasted until I retired in 1991.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: I left in April of '91. I told Murray, "I think it's time for me to leave," and he said, "Well, you gotta wait until I get somebody to take your place."
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you say, "I can have somebody in here tomorrow"?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had no voice in whom he --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- selected.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: He made a very good choice, I agree with the man who took the job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, you retired in '91.
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and so what have you been doing the last 20 years?
MR. ENGEL: Well, one of the things that came up is when we left the MSRE, we were told, "You've got to leave. Just leave it where it is. We think it's safe." Well, it wasn't all that stable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: It was not dangerous, but it wasn't stable, and so they decided at some point, "We've had some of this uranium moving around in the system. We don't know where it's going, what's happening; we need to look at it." So, for about four or five years, ORNL was involved in going back to the MSRE, seeing what's there, what has happened, and what are we going to do about it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: They asked me to come in on a consulting basis, which I did off and on over a period of four or five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- looking at that system and trying to figure out what to do, and so on, and then, at some point, Bechtel Jacobs came in as a remediation contractor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and activities at the Laboratory were split between remediation programs and ongoing programs --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and Bechtel Jacobs got the remediation part --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so they took over fixing the MSRE, or cleaning up what was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they apparently had no interest in me. I've never heard from them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well ...
MR. ENGEL: -- and I think they have certainly spent a great deal of money.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I have some misgivings about how effectively they have spent that money --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but I'm not involved.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Well, let's go back, and I guess since after that, you've just been enjoying retirement, haven't you?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, I've been invited here and there to talk about Molten Salt Technology. I spent a week in Korea, spent a week in the Czech Republic, went up to Schenectady with a colleague to give a two-day symposium on Molten Salt Technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, is it still a vital, I mean, you know --
MR. ENGEL: It is just within the last I would say year or so garnered a lot of interest around the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? And why is that?
MR. ENGEL: Well, part of it comes, I think, and this is personal opinion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, that's fine.
MR. ENGEL: -- that China has become interested, and the reason I think that China is interested is that they recognize that they've got to have all of the production capability that they can develop --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- from whatever source or in whatever form --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- whether it's fission technology from the uranium plutonium cycle, fission technology from the U-233 thorium system, solar, wind, fusion; they're chasing them all down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they have an interest in molten salt technology, and, as I understand it, and I have no direct knowledge of their program, they have a fairly ambitious program going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: India has always been interested because of their monazite sand thorium resource.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I've been in contact with a fellow from New York, who made a fortune in a totally unrelated business, who has decided that he's going to build molten salt reactors and install them in South Africa, relatively small systems, 500-megawatts and down, close to the load centers, where they don't have a nationwide distribution network for electricity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so you build the reactor near the load center. He has very ambitious plans --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and at one point made contact. I have not heard from him for several months. But the one I heard from most recently is an outfit from Norway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- working through a fellow in Ottawa, Canada, who has invented a revolutionary approach to the U-233 Thorium Breeding System --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I get e-mails back and forth from these various people about this and, "What do you think of this?"
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you're probably one of the very few people in the world that is the molten salt guy, aren't you?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I've been told that. In fact, and I know he said it in jest but Alvin Weinberg said, "You ought to be able to get $5,000.00 a day for your services."
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. ENGEL: Nobody has offered me that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, I understand. I understand. I understand. All right, well let's go back and tell me about when you got married and something, just for a few minutes, about your life here in Oak Ridge --
MR. ENGEL: Okay, well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- outside of work.
MR. ENGEL: -- I am not an extremely social person.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I'm sort of private and quiet, but through the Methodist Church, as a matter of fact, back in the early '50s, there were a lot of single people in Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one of the places they gathered was a young adult program at First Methodist Church --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they met, as I recall, weekly or monthly or something, just to socialize --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it didn't matter what church you came from. I was not in the Methodist Church at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But anyway, through that program, I met this young woman, and several other people met other people in that. In fact, the year we got married, there were like a dozen weddings of people who had met through that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Through that group.
MR. ENGEL: -- group program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and some of them are still in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, your wife, you told me when I first got here that she's from Tennessee.
MR. ENGEL: She's Middle Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: She's from a very small town in Middle Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did she end up in Oak Ridge?
MR. ENGEL: Well, one of the people, who I think he must have been in personnel at Y-12, was from the same county.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: What was his name? Tallmadge Cantrell. He somehow got into Oak Ridge, and my wife was working at a bank in Middle Tennessee, her sister was working there, and he knew my wife's family --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and said, "You know, there are good opportunities for well-paying jobs in Oak Ridge," and so Lorraine's sister moved at some point to Oak Ridge, and Lorraine and that sister were very close, and so a year or so later, Lorraine moved to Oak Ridge, and this was, I think -- it must have been '55 or '56.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But anyway, we met through this group at First Methodist Church, and things evolved from there, and Lorraine's sister got married in late 1958 to a fellow she had met through this program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, at some point, we had decided we would be married sometime the next year. Well, about that time, this inquiry came up, "Can we send somebody to Berlin?" --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I said, "Yeah, I'd like to go, but I'm in the process of trying to get married. When is this going to happen?" "Well, we don't know."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: "When we get all the paperwork done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, we went ahead and had wedding plans going to be married in her home church in Middle Tennessee. Well, do we wait and not get married? Do we have the wedding early so that we'll be available? Well, it turns out thing stretched out enough, so we were married May 17, and then about July 10 -- no, it was later than that. It was about the 14th of July, I got the message, "You should be in Berlin next Monday."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. There you go, so that worked out fine. That worked out okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, we were newly married, and of course Lorraine spoke no German --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and back then, while a lot of people in Berlin spoke English, the man in the street did not speak English.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The shopkeeper in the butcher shop, or the dry goods or the bakery or the stationery store didn't speak English --
MR. MCDANIEL: Didn't speak English.
MR. ENGEL: -- so she got dropped in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did she learn pretty well, pretty fast?
MR. ENGEL: She managed to get along without really learning all that much German.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: We made a few friends in the Military, but we didn't have access to the PX. All of our living was done, as the Military people said, on the economy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: We shopped in the local stores, she got her hair done at the local hairdressers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, was that a Military base where you were living?
MR. ENGEL: Oh no, it was a private home.
MR. MCDANIEL: A private home, okay. I see.
MR. ENGEL: We were renting space. This fellow, he was a physician, his wife was also a physician, they had built a house California style but to Berlin standards.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: There were two levels. The main level was the head of the house, and then the tradition was you had an upper level where one of your children lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and when the old couple got too infirm, they moved upstairs and the children took over the main residence.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: Well, these people, the upper level was not vacant. It was occupied by somebody who was associated with the U.S. Government in some way, and I never knew exactly what his job was, but I think it was CIA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: I don't know that for a fact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: He spoke excellent English and German, and his wife was German.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But they were moving out --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and said, "Okay, when they move out, you can move into this upstairs apartment."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Well, things kind of stretched on. We were staying in a - a sort of hotel, boardinghouse arrangement --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they said, "Well, we're not sure when those guys are gonna move out. We are going to move to Spain. We customarily go to Spain, and this is fall approaching, cold weather." So, the couple, both of whom are physicians --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- said, "We'll just leave and you can take our apartment downstairs until such time as the people upstairs move out," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so we did. Had a very nice home. By German standards at the time, fairly expensive, but by U.S. standards, very reasonably priced --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- because the exchange rate, which is now roughly a dollar per mark, was 4.2 marks for a dollar.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, my salary came out and they reimbursed the Lab for my U.S. salary.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see.
MR. ENGEL: So, I'm living on U.S. dollars in an economy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Four times.
MR. ENGEL: -- four times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Four times. Exactly, so it was like living in the U.S. three-quarters cheaper, something like that.
MR. ENGEL: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you spent the year there, and then you came back --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- here, and then ...
MR. ENGEL: On the way back, somehow -- well, Lorraine was pregnant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I'm not sure how that happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go, so she was pregnant. By the time you came back, she was pregnant.
MR. ENGEL: Right --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and she was about a month away, and we had very good medical care in Germany, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We said, "That's no problem." Well, we were flying through London, took a day to do some sightseeing in London --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was a mistake --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. ENGEL: -- because our son managed to get born overnight, well, at 7:00 in the morning, while we were --
MR. MCDANIEL: In London?
MR. ENGEL: -- in London.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. ENGEL: He was premature --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- by four weeks, but healthy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the pediatrician said, "You can't take him out of the country for at least two weeks."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. ENGEL: So, we stayed in London for two weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what would that make him, citizenship-wise?
MR. ENGEL: Dual.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, dual citizenship.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: I went to the U.S. embassy, got him registered as a U.S. citizen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Since he was born in England, he is automatically a British citizen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Back then, Britain did not recognize photocopying, so I have three or four handwritten copies of his British birth certificate --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one from the U.S. embassy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, you stayed there for two weeks, and then you came back.
MR. ENGEL: Now there's one interesting feature I have to throw in here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: That two weeks happened to start one week before Princess Margaret got married in London --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and extended to one week --
MR. MCDANIEL: After.
MR. ENGEL: -- after so we were there through all the chaos and confusion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- of the royal wedding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, and what year was that? That was --
MR. ENGEL: 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 1960. Okay. All right. But when you came back, you came back and you found a place to live.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, we lived in a garden apartment then --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- one of the two-bedroom garden apartments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and then did you have other children?
MR. ENGEL: We had a daughter --
MR. MCDANIEL: Had a daughter.
MR. ENGEL: -- who was born a year and a half later. But, after we got back, one of the first things we did was set out to build this house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we moved in in November of 1961.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, in this house?
MR. ENGEL: In this house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which we had custom built for us by a couple of builders who did a very nice job, we thought --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we have not felt impelled to move into a bigger and grander house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so we just stayed here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure, of course, of course.
MR. ENGEL: But, as I said, we moved in in November, and Teresa was born the following February.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, your kids, they went through the school system.
MR. ENGEL: Right, they went through the Oak Ridge school system. Our son went to MTSU, got a BA and an MBA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Played trombone throughout the time he was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and then went to work in the Nashville area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and has been in that area ever since. He married a young woman whose background is from Columbia, Tennessee --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and she's with one of the big banking systems in Nashville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: And our daughter went to Virginia Tech for her bachelor's degree. We said, "Well, if you can get enough scholarships to pay for the difference between going in-state and out-of-state," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- well, she got a presidential scholarship --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's pretty good.
MR. ENGEL: -- which paid her expenses, and then she moved on to Kentucky for a master's degree in mathematics. She started out chemical engineering and decided she didn't like that, she was going to do mathematics --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then went on to a PhD, and is now living in upstate New York teaching math at Ithaca College.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: She and colleagues have written a couple of textbooks --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- for college math purposes, and they have two boys who are now 13 and 10. Richard has two children, a son and a daughter, 21 and 18, who are now both at UT.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Well, that's handy.
MR. ENGEL: Except we never see them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, of course not. They're college students. I want to take about three or four more minutes. Now, you said you weren't very social. Has that changed over the years?
MR. ENGEL: Well, my wife is a very social person.
MR. MCDANIEL: She's social enough for both of you, is that --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- what you're saying?
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. I understand. So, were you involved in the community activities, or was there anything particular that you were --
MR. ENGEL: To some extent. Lorraine is very active in the Oak Ridge Woman's Club --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and has been forever, practically. I don't know when she got started in that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I've been involved in various technical organizations: the American Nuclear Society, the Tau Beta Pi, which is the engineering honorary. I was an alumnus, or I am. I maintain my alumnus status in that, but I'm not active --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I had delivered a number of papers at ANS meetings -- American Nuclear Society --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- during my work at the Lab, so I've maintained an interest in that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I'm sure you're familiar with ORICL. [Note: Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yes. Yes, absolutely.
MR. ENGEL: We're both active in ORICL, and I serve on the Board of Directors there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right, which to me is just a great program. I mean it's a fantastic program.
MR. ENGEL: And I help out with their technical support, to some degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. Well, good. Well, thanks so much for taking time to talk, and --
MR. ENGEL: Well, as I said, it's my pleasure. I'm sorry my voice is so weak.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. It worked out just fine. That's what we have these microphones for. So, thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
MR. ENGEL: Well, as I say, it was my pleasure. I didn't think we'd find very much to talk about, but we managed to kill --
MR. MCDANIEL: We've been going for about 100 minutes. Well, thank you.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF RICHARD ENGEL
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
December 8, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December 8, 2011, and I am at the home of Mr. Richard Engel here in Oak Ridge. Mr. Engel, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MR. ENGEL: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you tell us about where you were born and raised, and something about your family, and let's start at the very beginning.
MR. ENGEL: All right. I was born in nominally Toledo, Ohio, but an area that is now incorporated as Oregon, Ohio. I went to grammar school and high school there; graduated from Clay High School. Attended the University of Toledo for four years. It was basically a commuter college at that time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and graduated in 1953.
MR. MCDANIEL: What year were you born?
MR. ENGEL: 1931.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1931, and what did your mom and dad do?
MR. ENGEL: Well, my father was a pipe fitter with Standard Oil Company of Ohio. Both my parents were immigrants from Germany. They had not met, of course, before they came to the U.S., but subsequently met and married and lived there for the rest of their lives.
MR. MCDANIEL: How old were they when they came to the U.S.?
MR. ENGEL: Well, let's see. My father came in 1922, so he would have been about 23 years old. My mother came in 1924, and she would have been 27 at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so they met in Cleveland, did you say?
MR. ENGEL: In Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: In Toledo. Excuse me.
MR. ENGEL: Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: In the Toledo area, and they set up a home and had you. Did they have --
MR. ENGEL: Well, actually, my mother came with her parents.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Her father had come earlier; her mother and she came later. There was sort of an unwritten rule back then that you went where you had family or friends or some kind of connections, and my grandmother's sister and some of her family was already living in Toledo, so it was a natural place for them to come.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: My father got there principally by chance, although there was a connection that's too detailed to go into.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, they both ended up in Toledo, anyway.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. ENGEL: I had one sister who was a year and a half older than I. She died about four years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were born, you said, in --
MR. ENGEL: '31.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- '31, so that was during the Depression.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me what you can remember about that.
MR. ENGEL: Well, not a whole lot. I remember that for a while -- well, my father worked for the New York Central Railroad prior to the Depression, and then lost his job, spent some time working on some of the public works activities that were instituted, I guess, by Roosevelt.
MR. MCDANIEL: The WPA or the CCC.
MR. ENGEL: -- which one, I don't remember --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- but it was in the Toledo area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- mostly razing old homes, and then was fortunate enough to get a job with Standard Oil, which made things considerably better, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. What did he do with Standard Oil?
MR. ENGEL: He was a pipe fitter --
MR. MCDANIEL: A pipe fitter. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and he did a little bit of moonlighting on the side for other people, and I was sort of his apprentice, or let's say step-and-fetch-it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- while he was doing things for people in their homes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, I had an early contact with things mechanical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was he trained as a pipe fitter, or did he --
MR. ENGEL: No, no.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- just pick it up? He just learned on the job?
MR. ENGEL: No, he had what at that time was customary for farmers, four years of formal education.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Of course, he went on and educated himself and they both became citizens as soon as --
MR. MCDANIEL: But he had that four years of education in Germany --
MR. ENGEL: -- yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- before he came to the U.S. Right. Why did they leave Germany?
MR. ENGEL: Well, the early '20s times were very difficult in Germany because of the reparation demands placed upon Germany at the end of World War I, and inflation was rampant, things were really bad in many ways --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so some people just left.
MR. MCDANIEL: They just left. Right, right. Okay, so you went to school there outside of Toledo --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and went to high school, and what was that like?
MR. ENGEL: Well, it was pretty much like any other high school. We were fortunate enough to be in a -- at that time, it was a township organization --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that was a fairly prosperous township, so we had a really good school system, very well-funded, very well staffed, and it was a good place to go to school.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure Toledo at that time was very industrial --
MR. ENGEL: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so would you say kind of that whole area was blue collar?
MR. ENGEL: It was certainly blue collar. Now, Oregon Township was mostly farming community.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: There were, however, four oil refineries within the township, which provided a convenient tax base --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- for real estate taxes, which funded everything in the township.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand. I understand. Well, that's good. So, you graduated high school, and then you went to college --
MR. ENGEL: College at the University of Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you said it was basically a commuter college.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. There were some dormitories there, and before I graduated, they had built three relatively good-sized dormitories. It has now greatly expanded to well over 20,000 students.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. ENGEL: There were about 5,000 students there when I was going to school there, and a lot of them were going on the GI Bill at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, because this was after the war was over.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you study there?
MR. ENGEL: Chemical engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I went in thinking I was going to go into chemical engineering, and I got a degree in chemical engineering --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- bachelor's, BS.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Any particular reason that interested you?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had been interested in chemistry, and because of my background with my father, and my grandfather was a master mechanic, he was a master machinist, I should say --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- worked in the tool and die business in Toledo, which at that time Toledo provided a lot of support to the auto industry --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the Willis Overland Company was in Toledo, which ended up making the Jeeps in World War II --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- or World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, there was a lot of industry within Toledo.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But with the mechanical background from both sides, I just ended up in engineering as opposed to pure chemistry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. So, you graduated from there. What year did you graduate --
MR. ENGEL: 1953 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 1953.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, at that time, well, shortly before I graduated, I learned about this program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- ORSORT. In fact, for the two previous years, students from Toledo had been admitted to ORSORT as students. It was a pretty selective program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I was fortunate enough to be chosen that year, and there was yet another from the university that was chosen the following year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- coincidentally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But it was recognized as the premiere school for nuclear reactor technology --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- at that time. Now, there were programs at North Carolina and at Penn State in nuclear engineering, but the system, or the program in Oak Ridge had access to what then was classified technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, you might as well come to the place where it all started, you know?
MR. ENGEL: Well, of course all of that technology has long since been declassified --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- primarily during the Geneva Conferences that took place in the middle '50s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But it was a good place to go. There were 80 students in that class.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you came there after you graduated or --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- okay, after you graduated.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, I graduated in June, moved down here in September --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- spent my first night at the Alexander Hotel, as a matter of fact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: We were nominally employees of Union Carbide --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- although we were paid probably somewhat less than the going monthly salary for bachelor degree engineers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, because you were going to school.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, and you went to ORSORT for a year, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was a year program.
MR. ENGEL: One-year program. Finished up sometime toward the end of August the following year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, as a part of that program, were you guaranteed a job?
MR. ENGEL: I was not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was handled very much like any university would be handled. They brought people in to make presentations, people they were interested in. We were invited on interview trips to places like Pittsburgh for Westinghouse, Schenectady for GE. I went on a couple of interview trips, and I had a couple of other job offers, as well as one from the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well now, when you were a student at ORSORT -- tell me a little bit about that program. Tell me what you remember about it, and my understanding is the professors or instructors, most of them were from the Lab --
MR. ENGEL: They were.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and they were experts in their field.
MR. ENGEL: They were, indeed, and some of them were pioneers in their fields. What at the time seemed elderly lady to me in Health Physics was Elda Anderson --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- who was very well known in that field and the radiation shielding was -- oh, I can't think of his name right now. It'll come to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. ENGEL: But then, the people who taught reactor theory class, for example, subsequently wrote a textbook on the subject.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Other people wrote other textbooks. Everitt P. Blizard was the shielding person. He also, I think, wrote a textbook on that subject.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: So, we were in the midst of things. The program was very intense. I never worked so hard as a student in all my life --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- before or since, and I heard that from a great many of the people there. There were two categories of students. There were those who were Category, I think, A, who were not sponsored by a company, and then there was Category B, which was people who were sent by their sponsoring company --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which might have been, well, some from the Navy Department, one fellow was Air Force, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, in fact, and a lot from what was then AEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But there were 40 in each category, but there were students from all over the country, a couple of friends from Caltech, one had an MS in physics from Chicago, so I, with my piddling BS degree, was sort of at the low end of the scale.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But everybody agreed that it was a more intensive education program than they had faced before.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, was it co-ed? Were there women in the class?
MR. ENGEL: There were none --
MR. MCDANIEL: There were none?
MR. ENGEL: -- and I don't know the reason for that except, just guessing, that nobody bothered to apply.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But let's face it, nearly 60 years ago there was less emphasis on equality in those areas.
MR. MCDANIEL: There may just not have been a lot of women in that field, you know, yet, at that point.
MR. ENGEL: That's probably also true.
MR. MCDANIEL: Probably true. Now, where did you live when you were going to school?
MR. ENGEL: I lived in one of the dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. ENGEL: Back then, if you were single and didn't have any special connections, you were assigned a room in a dormitory, and it was one of the H-shaped dormitories. You may recall there were two. There were the S-shaped ones and the H-shaped, and it was just down the hill from -- oh, what's the one on top of the hill? Is it Cambridge? Anyway, it was Carlisle Hall was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Carlisle. Carlisle Hall. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Of course, it was like dormitories of that time. You had your room, which was about ten feet long, maybe eight feet wide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The shower and bathroom facilities were in the middle part of the H.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Those dormitories had cooking facilities of a sort in there, but I never made use of those.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, where did you go to eat?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, any number of the restaurants in the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Cafeterias were still being operated at that point.
MR. ENGEL: There were. The T&C Cafeteria, which was where The Soup Kitchen is now, was in operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: The Mayflower, across the street from there, was in operation. The China Wok, which is in that area, was in operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Let's see. I'm trying to think. Of course, the --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was the Snow White there yet?
MR. ENGEL: The Snow White was there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I tried to avoid the Snow White as much as I could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why, because it was busy, or because the food wasn't very good?
MR. ENGEL: Well, the food didn't appeal to me, and that's primarily the reason.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it very southern? Is that what it was?
MR. ENGEL: Well, it was kind of greasy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, kind of -- right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that's something that I wasn't accustomed to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. I understand. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But mostly, in restaurants, of course the Oak Terrace was there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Probably couldn't afford to go to it very often --
MR. ENGEL: Well, we weren't short of money. I mean my pay was something over $300.00 a month, which wasn't bad for 1953 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so I could afford to eat, and the dorm cost -- I'm thinking it was like $40.00 a month rent is the sort of thing I remember.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you did your year at ORSORT?
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was it located?
MR. ENGEL: There was a building within the ORNL main X-10 area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- toward the west end of the plant. At that time, as you came in the gate at the west end, you came in the gate, the first building on the right as you came in was the fire hall --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the fire department, and there was a building on the left that was right along the fence, which was used as office space by the school staff and by some of the students. Everybody was assigned space in an "office."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: But then, the next building on the left, which has been demolished within the last couple of years, was the ORSORT building, and, as I understand it, that building was built in the very early '50s, like '51 or so, for that purpose.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: The main central part of the building was basically a lecture hall. It was a one-story wooden structure. But the lectures were delivered there, chalkboards across the front, and there was literally chalkboards back then, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, of course.
MR. ENGEL: Some office spaces on both sides of that room, but then the chemistry lab was up on the hill. A lot of the physics lab work was done at the Graphite Reactor Building.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you did lots of things around the site --
MR. ENGEL: around the site --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the X-10 site.
MR. ENGEL: -- but primarily at the west side of the facility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We didn't have much occasion to go to the east side of the facility where the 4500 Building was located. Even the medical facility at that time was in a building just east of the school building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, you were officially employees of Union --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Carbide, and you were treated as such.
MR. ENGEL: As such, and, in fact, that year went on my employee record as a year of seniority.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Well, good. So, you came to the end of that year, you learned a lot, you worked hard --
MR. ENGEL: Oh, I think I knew everything at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you learned a lot, you worked hard, and you came to the end of that year; tell me what happened.
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had, as I said, a couple offers for employment, one of which was from ORNL in the Chemical Technology Division. Floyd Culler was Division Director at that time, and I'm sure that's a name you know well --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I decided that the work I would be doing there was more chemically oriented than the kind of work I would have been doing for Westinghouse or GE. GE, at that time, was working hard on the sodium cooled system for the submarine, and Westinghouse, of course, was working on the Nautilus Project --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which evolved into all their power reactor work, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: But it just had more appeal to me at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, you graduated from that program, and then you went to work --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right here in Oak Ridge.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and the one thing that I remember well about that, for the last three months before we finished at the end of August, we had moved into an E-2 apartment building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Back then, the schoolteachers all left town. The schoolteachers were fortunate. They could have an apartment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- if there were two, or three, or four of them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we had made contact with a group, one of whom now lives across the street from us, to sublet their E-2, two-bedroom apartment for the summer --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was a benefit to them, they didn't have to give up the apartment, and we could move out of the dormitories.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, so who was we, you and --
MR. ENGEL: We and a couple of other ORSORT students.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. So, you sublet the apartment?
MR. ENGEL: Right, and the one condition I put on taking a job here was, "I will take the job if you can get me an apartment as opposed to a dormitory room --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the next day, I had a one-bedroom brick apartment --
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. ENGEL: -- available.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were tired of dormitory rooms, weren't you?
MR. ENGEL: I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yes. Well, good. Well, good. So, you got the apartment and you were working, and so tell me a little bit about your work and what you did over the years.
MR. ENGEL: Well, at that time, I was in the Chemical Technology Division, and one of the programs ongoing was the Aqueous Homogenous Reactor Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now tell me what that means.
MR. ENGEL: All right. It is a reactor concept that employs uranium sulfate as a fuel dissolved in heavy water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and circulating as a liquid fuel through the core, out to a heat exchanger, where one could generate, nominally, electricity and then back in.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, the uranium sulfate was dissolved in the water?
MR. ENGEL: Right --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is very different from the solid fuel concept, where you have fuel that's clad with something, most notoriously now zircaloy, which is not a pleasant material.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was a concept that was brought about -- it was E.P. Wigner and Weinberg who came up with the concept --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and Alvin Weinberg used to describe it as a pot, a pipe, and a pump --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which basically is what it was, but there's an infinite variety of stuff that goes with it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, but fundamentally that's what it was.
MR. ENGEL: Fundamentally, that's what it was, and it was a very good concept. It did have its limitations --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and was subsequently abandoned. While I was going to school at ORSORT, the first Homogeneous Reactor experiment was operated at ORNL in Melton Valley, which is the valley just south of the main ORNL area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- X-10 area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was more or less successful, and so the decision was made, "Let's go on with the next experiment," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was dubbed the HRT, Homogeneous Reactor Test. The first one was HRE, Homogeneous Reactor Experiment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: One of the ideas associated with that is that fission products are largely insoluble in this liquid tend to precipitate form solid material in the fuel, and if you can separate these out, you have much less loss of neutrons to fission products, and hence a more effective breeding concept, because one neutron is required to keep the fission process going, and then, if you're going to breed, you need one neutron to make the next fuel item --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and a few to lose and scatter around, and if you lose too many of the fission products, you have lost your breeding potential.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: So, the idea was, we will take a side-stream of this salt, run it through a very, very small centrifugal separator to separate out the solid fission product particles --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and these little separators were called hydroclones, a quarter inch in diameter and about that long --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- inside diameter, and you would pump the liquid through there fairly fast, the solids would separate and go down to a tank at the bottom --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- where they could be taken out and the clarified liquid would go back into the system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, by this time, the centrifuge technology was pretty -- I mean, you know, it was very useable, I mean, you know, for --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, the centrifugal.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, the --
MR. ENGEL: The centrifugal process. Now, these were not centrifuges --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right.
MR. ENGEL: -- per se, because it's a stationary little item there, and the separation force comes from bringing the liquid in tangentially so that it swirls.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Just like you've seen these vacuum cleaner ads for the --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- centrifugal separation process.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: It's the same principle --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that was to be a part of the second Homogeneous Reactor Experiment, and, in fact, it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: That system was built in the same building as HRE 1 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and was under construction shortly after I came to work, but I was involved in the development of these little cone-shaped hydroclones --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- along with other people, of course --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they worked very nicely, except the reactor wasn't all that successful, for a variety of other reasons.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: That was not the limiting consideration.
MR. MCDANIEL: But one of the main things that the Lab was doing at the time was experimenting and developing different types of reactors.
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was just one of the --
MR. ENGEL: That was one of them.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- one of them.
MR. ENGEL: The other one that was going on, on a more or less parallel course was the Aircraft Reactor Experiment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was about 200 yards up the road --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- from the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor Experiment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and I guess the ultimate goal for the Aircraft Reactor was to get it small enough and light enough to work.
MR. ENGEL: And with enough power intensity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- to be able to drive an airplane --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- except that people finally came to the realization, or I guess the question, "Do we really want that mass of radioactive material flying around over our heads?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly, exactly, and the politicians decided, "No," didn't they?
MR. ENGEL: Well, yeah, it was decided “no” for a variety of reasons.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I understand. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But that Aircraft Reactor Experiment became the forerunner of a subsequent reactor that I'm sure we'll get into later --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but let's finish up with --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, let's --
MR. ENGEL: -- the Aqueous System.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- right, right.
MR. ENGEL: Well, I spent some time on that, and the HRE 2 -- HRT, we called it then -- was moving toward operational state. The construction was well underway, and they decided they were going to need some people to operate this little processing facility at the reactor, and so they said, "Gee, you ought to learn about this reactor system if you're going to be involved in the chemical processing end of it," and so I moved over to the Y-12 area, where some of the experimental facilities for ORNL were located at that time, one of which was a large, high-pressure, high-temperature pumped water loop pumping uranyl sulfate solution. Worked there for a while, and then they decided they really needed some operators for this reactor, and so I was put on loan from the Chemical Technology Division to what was then the Reactor Experimental Engineering Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was called REED, R-E-E-D --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which came about, and that moved me back over to ORNL but into Melton Valley at the reactor site about the time they were training people for reactor operation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I became involved in the operation of that reactor, and worked on shift. There was around-the-clock operation, so I worked as a Shift Engineer and then Shift Supervisor for a couple of years on that project. As the reactor was being put through its preliminary paces to check out, "Is it working? What's not working? What do we have to do? What do we have to fix?" and of course in any new project, there's a good bit of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: Then, it went into operation and appeared to be going along very successfully, and then what I choose to call the Achilles' Heel of the project made itself known. In order to be successful as a power reactor, you need to be able to produce steam at a reasonably high temperature.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Now, for a Pressurized Water Reactor, that temperature is of the order of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and in the HRE program, we were talking in centigrade, which is in the neighborhood of 300 degrees C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, we said, "Okay, this reactor has to operate at least a maximum temperature of 300 degrees C." The low temperature would be lower than that, but you have to get up to 300.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Well, uranyl sulfate solution in water, be it heavy water or ordinary water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- has an unpleasant property in that it separates into two liquid phases at something above 340 degrees C.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, from 300 to 340 is not all that much margin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: This, in fact, appears to be what happened within the HRT. The HRT core, and this reactor consisted of a central core that was about 32 inches in diameter zircaloy vessel, conical at the bottom, with up-flow of the fuel solution --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- through the core. It's inside a roughly five-foot diameter pressure vessel that was stainless steel lined that contained a, at that time, reflector of just heavy water.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Was intended, ultimately, that that blanket would contain thorium oxide in a slurry, and so one would use the fission process in the core, let the neutrons run out to the blanket region and produce U-233 from thorium in the blanket, which could then be separated out, recycled back into the core --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so you have a breeder. And, at that time, the name of the game was breeding. I mean if you didn't have a reactor that could breed, you didn't have a reactor that was acceptable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, and just so people will know, breeding means to produce energy, to produce another --
MR. ENGEL: To produce more fuel --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- produce more fuel. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- than you consume.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: The breakeven point, you produce one atom for every atom that is consumed in the fission process. Now, not every one of those consumed atoms has produced fission.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: Some of them are non-productive --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- but whatever you burn up, you have to replace --
MR. MCDANIEL: You have to replace.
MR. ENGEL: -- in some way --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the idea, and it was heavily touted by the liquid metal fast breeder reactors, the sodium cooled system, was that they could produce a lot more surplus fuel, and any surplus is then made available to start up a new reactor when you build up enough stuff --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the claim then was that you could have a doubling time of five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. ENGEL: -- which meant that you could produce enough excess fuel to not only keep your reactor running, but to start up a new one every five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is really remarkable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: The Sodium-cooled Aqueous System, now that was a system operating on U-235 breeding plutonium.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was done in the '50s?
MR. ENGEL: Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is the late '50s, I guess, is when this --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- project was going on.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and the Aqueous System was based on thorium and uranium 233, as opposed to plutonium as a fissile material --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the potential for breeding gain is much smaller there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, even if you have a highly efficient system, you can't really compete, in principle, with the fast breeder reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- although the claim was that it's a much more stable system, you don't have to worry about the short neutron lifetimes and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- maintaining control of a fast reactor, which is a challenging task. At any rate --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were working on that project?
MR. ENGEL: -- we were working on that project. As I said, I was one of the shift engineers and then became shift supervisor, and as we were raising the system on its initial rise to full power, which was intended to be five megawatts, 5,000 kilowatts, something untoward happened and the system was shut down rather quickly. I happened to be on duty at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: That was my shift that this happened on --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was subsequently discovered that, apparently, some of this phase separation had occurred, some of this heavy phase, which was very concentrated in uranium, had somehow settled on the side of this, about one-centimeter-thick zirconium wall --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and burned a hole in it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Burned a hole in it.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so the -- well, it melted a hole in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: It was not really a burning process --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- per se --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so we got uranium solution into this otherwise clean blanket system, which made all the instruments say funny things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Who was I talking to the other day? I was interviewing a fellow, and this may have been the same situation, but he was talking about it burned a hole in it. Dick? What was his name? Anyway, I don't remember, but I think he was talking about the same situation.
MR. ENGEL: It may very well have been. It wasn't Dick Huntley, was it?
MR. MCDANIEL: No, it was a fellow; he lives out in Rarity Bay now. Maybe it wasn't Dick. Anyway, so --
MR. ENGEL: Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so, you had to shut it down --
MR. ENGEL: -- we had to shut down --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- all of a sudden.
MR. ENGEL: -- and figure out what happened, and this is before the days of closed-circuit television and all these other things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: There were two access ports into this system. One was into the reactor core through a flange at the top of that, and then off to the side was another access port into the blanket region --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the people who did the mechanical design developed a system that would go down from about 15 feet above it, down through this access port, erect an arm to the side in this blanket region, in the annular space between two vessels --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- erect an arm, and then erect another arm that went over this way, and then look through a mirror at the backside --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- where the hole was.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you had to put a camera down there to look?
MR. ENGEL: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, no? No, no.
MR. ENGEL: No camera. We had a telescope --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- up on the top level looking into a mirror at the top to a mirror at the bottom, to a mirror here, to another mirror there --
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- to look at this thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see, so it was just reflections --
MR. ENGEL: Just pure reflections, and then they devised a scheme for taking an impression of the hole, making a patch to fit it, and installing a patch. All of this is done in a very highly radioactive environment --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- working down through the shield box. The whole system was underground --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and there was about five feet of concrete shielding in two layers above the reactor system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so there was a port about this big that had a plug in it that could be removed and everything went down through that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it was very, I mean it was fairly difficult to do anything inside there.
MR. ENGEL: Oh, it was terribly difficult --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the people who devised the equipment and put it into operation did a remarkable job.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, how long did it take for that process to happen, to diagnose and repair, and all that?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, a couple of months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: Back then, we didn't have multiple layers of review and evaluation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and safety analysis, and design reviews --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and procedural reviews. It was very much easier to do anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. You just kind of said, "This is what we think is gonna work, so let's go make it happen," generally.
MR. ENGEL: They were reviewed from a safety standpoint --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- "Are you doing anything that is unsafe?" Now, from the standpoint of, "Is it going to be successful?" you didn't have to guarantee success --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- because if that failed, you could try something else.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: In the current climate, you don't even start until you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to be successful --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was much more challenging.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I'm sure. So, after that project, what did you move on to?
MR. ENGEL: Well, that project continued until, oh, late 1959, 1960. I moved out of the operations end into an office job, which was looking at the data, analyzing data, evaluating performance, and things of that sort --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- as opposed to the operations side, and then my particular career was interrupted by about ten months. By that time, the ORSORT program had evolved to an international program, and there were a lot of international students at ORSORT --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- one of whom was from Germany, and the Germans had purchased a small 50-kilowatt research reactor, a liquid fuel uranyl sulfate in water that was marketed by, I think it was Atomics International that marketed them and installed them around the world in various places as research facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: They were very small. They operated well below the boiling temperature of the water, primarily to serve as sources of neutrons to be used for physics experiments, chemical experiments, making tracer elements to use, and things of that sort.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: This organization, newly established in Berlin, called the Hahn-Meitner Institute for Nuclear Research, had bought one --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the supplier provided it, installed it, and said, "Okay, there you are."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: So, they said, "Gee, we'd like to have someone who's had a little bit of experience come over, and we think we know what we're doing, but we want somebody to sort of hold our hand --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- while we go through the initial stages of operation," and I was fortunate enough to be selected for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how did that selection process -- were they working with the Lab, or did they just call the Lab and say --
MR. ENGEL: Well, this one fellow was a student at ORSORT --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, I see, that's right. That's right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and he was going to be the manager for the operations group for this reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so he approached Laboratory management and said, "Is there somebody that we could borrow?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: They would pay the salary and expenses of whoever came over there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- if the Lab would provide somebody to go over --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they were looking for somebody who had been involved in the Aqueous Homogeneous Project, and I happened to be the one that got picked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and probably somebody who knew something about Germany, or German, or could speak German. Could you speak German?
MR. ENGEL: I could speak German after a fashion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- because --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. I can speak English after a fashion, so ...
MR. ENGEL: - well, this is important, because the German that I could speak was totally different from the educated German that was spoken by professionals --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- in Berlin --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- because my father was a farmer, my mother had some education, but they spoke a dialect, which is peculiar to southwest Germany --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and while I had to speak German to my grandparents because they wanted me to learn German, not because they couldn't speak English --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the German that I learned was the southwest German dialect --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is a very casual German --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- compared to the formal German that is used in professional circles in Berlin.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, yes, I could speak German and I could understand very well, but it's like somebody coming out of the hills in Windrock and trying to speak to some of the PhD scientists at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly. So, you went there for, what did you say, ten months, a year?
MR. ENGEL: Nearly a year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Nearly a year, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- with a new wife.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was going to ask, you met your wife. I want to come back to that. So, you went there for a year, and you helped them get started.
MR. ENGEL: Right, and then came back and finished up writing some of the final reports on the Aqueous System --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and about that time, there was a -- and I don't remember how the decision was made exactly but it was made in Washington. There were three concepts going for a Fluid Fuel System, and three that were primary contenders.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: One was the Aqueous System, one was the Molten Salt System, which was an outgrowth of the Aircraft Reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the third one was a Liquid Bismuth System circulating a slurry of thorium oxide that was proposed by Brookhaven National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were other fluid fuel systems that had been proposed, and I say fluid as opposed to liquid because one of them was actually a gas system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was being proposed, as I recall, by Georgia Tech. But there was something convened, and there's a book written about that thick, on these three concepts, and the decision was made that the Molten Salt System was judged to be the one most likely to be successful as a power-producing system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so all effort was directed to that system, and the Liquid Bismuth System and the Aqueous System were dropped --
MR. MCDANIEL: Were dropped.
MR. ENGEL: -- from AEC's program at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now, was the Lab, were they already doing a Molten Salt?
MR. ENGEL: They were.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so they were already doing that. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: They were building on the experience from the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, which was a Molten Salt System.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: So, based on that, they were moving ahead with the design, and were well along with the design because, as I say, they competed successfully in this --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- system, and so I got moved over to the Molten Salt System. When I went in, they were well along with some of the core design, but I was involved in some of the analysis of the core design, safety analysis, things of that sort, and then, as construction moved along, I moved over to the reactor site and we did the planning of the experimental program for the reactor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the training program for the operators, the implementation for the computerized data gathering system. That was the first reactor that I know of that had a computer installed, and it filled the space about the size of this room --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- to collect data automatically without having the operators go around and read this instrument, read this instrument. We still did a lot of that, but there was a system developed and put in place to let the computer gather a lot of data and make a lot of calculations with that data --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I was involved in the preparation of that system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: That computer was built by a company in California, and the build schedule for the MSRE -- Molten Salt Reactor Experiment -- was just about the same as the build schedule for Bull Run Steam Plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and, in fact, both TVA at Bull Run and ORNL at the MSRE contracted to buy the same computer system --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, after MSRE was shut down, a number of the things were shipped over to TVA to use as spare parts on their --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- computer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now, was the Molten Salt Reactor, was it located down in Melton Valley?
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: The history of the Aircraft Reactor was involved in this because the ARE, the Aircraft Reactor Experiment, was operated in an underground cell in a particular building, Building 7503, which is irrelevant, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- at the other end of that building, they had made an excavation and installed a cylindrical tank, which was intended to be the containment vessel for the Aircraft Reactor Test --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- the nominally 60-megawatt reactor, which has been variously called a fireball reactor, which you have probably heard of, it was a beryllium reflector moderated system, about this diameter, and for a long time there was a big hunk of that beryllium that stayed in one of the Reactor Division buildings at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: And they had made the excavation for and installed this big tank, which had a hemispherical head on the bottom and a hemispherical head on top. Then, when the Aircraft Reactor Program was cancelled, we said, "Well, we've got this building, we're going to build a Molten Salt Reactor, so we'll just put it there."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We had to make some modifications. We had to cut off the hemispherical head at the top and put a flat top on it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and remove some extra stuff and provided a cell for the drain tank, and what have you --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but the design was going ahead on modifying that building in the early '60s period, after the Aircraft Program was cancelled, which was about 1959 or 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask a question, and this may sound silly but it's something I'm sure other people -- so, these things were underground. Why were they underground? Was it the shielding?
MR. ENGEL: It was shield -- well, you either stack up a bunch of shielding around it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then put a lid on it, which means if you want to work remotely, you have to climb up here to do it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- or you dig a hole and put it in the ground and work from ground level --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- down in a hole --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- which is easier to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's easier to do.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and you have all the ground shielding now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and the ground shielded it pretty well.
MR. ENGEL: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I mean there was actually a second layer of containment outside of that, which had shielding installed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- in it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and all the things that went in that went through the sides, had to go through two layers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and there were other places, but everything was heavily shielded from the outside.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: But we had a flat top so that you could work from above.
MR. MCDANIEL: Work from ground level, okay. Okay, so the Molten Salt Reactor, you worked on that project.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, and that went on, and there we did the planning. I always had a small group of people working on the analysis of the operation, the nuclear and mechanical analysis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The chemistry was under somebody else's domain --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- although we had to keep up with it, and there was a lot of chemical activity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was there?
MR. ENGEL: -- on that.
MR. MCDANIEL: But by now, you had had so much experience that you didn't concentrate on the chemical aspect of it, I mean, you know, you --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. Well, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you had learned so much about the other aspects of it.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah. We were doing the nuclear behavior --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- how much fuel are we burning, are we seeing the kind of nuclear characteristics that people calculated, put the reactor through its paces with perturbations here, perturbations there, things of that sort.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now, at this point in time, late '50s, early '60s --
MR. ENGEL: This is middle '60s.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- middle '60s --
MR. ENGEL: The reactor achieved criticality in June of 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: Prior to that was all the installation, the checkout, the non-nuclear testing --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and all this sort of stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was Oak Ridge, I mean was the Lab at that point -- I'm sure there were other people around the country and around the world that were doing this type of work, too, but was the Lab, I guess, far ahead of the curve as far as what they were doing?
MR. ENGEL: So far as I know, nobody else was much interested in liquid fuel systems.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: There was, in this group in Berlin, some interest in following what was going on, but so far as I know, nobody had an Active Development Program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: As we moved on, interest evolved in places like India, where because of their large thorium resource, were interested in a thorium U-233 cycle --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it looked like the Molten Salt concept was the most likely to be successful --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- on that, and so they sent people over to see what's going on, and we had a couple of people from India who worked with us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: People in Taiwan had an interest. We had Taiwanese who worked with us for a while, and others, but they had no programs of their own.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. So, in '65, it went critical --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and how did that work out?
MR. ENGEL: It worked out very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: It was almost, I would say, phenomenally successful for a first experiment. Now, there were problems.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: There were things that didn't go right, and valves that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second.
MR. ENGEL: Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. I lost your microphone for a second.
MR. ENGEL: I'm sorry. I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no, no, it wasn't you, I don't think. Okay, so valves that --
MR. ENGEL: You know, valves got plugged with oil vapors and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- things of that sort, things that had to be fixed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but nothing -- we liked to call them showstoppers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: There were no showstoppers in the system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Okay, so what did you do after that? Did you stay with that reactor program?
MR. ENGEL: Now, that particular program went on -- well, in '68 we said, "Okay, we've seen what we want to see with U-235. Let's take out the U-235 and put in U-233," which will be the ultimate fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: And how do you get U-233?
MR. ENGEL: You neutron-eradiate thorium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: You absorb a neutron in thorium. Thorium is 232.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: You put in a neutron and it becomes thorium 233, which decays quickly to protactinium 233, which then subsequently decays to uranium 233.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Scary enough, I understood that, so ...
MR. ENGEL: And this particular U-233, I'm not sure where it came from.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: It may have come from Savannah River for all I know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But we do know that Admiral Rickover had a program going in one of his water cooled reactors in Shippingsport, where he put some thorium in that reactor and produced some 233. He was going to have a light-water breeder --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- which didn't work out, but they made some U-233 in that reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But, as I say, I don't think that's the -- what did I do with my handkerchief?
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. So, they took the U-235 out --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and they were going to replace it, and in '68 decided, "Well, let's put U-233 in there."
MR. ENGEL: Right, and one of the things we liked to brag about is that the process of removing the uranium 235 from a pot full of molten salt, very highly radioactive, we'd treat the stuff with gaseous fluorine, which converts the uranium that's in there as UF4 to UF6, and the UF6 comes off as a vapor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: You trap out the fission products and you catch the UF6 in containers about this big full of sodium iodide crystals --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and these things were clean enough, the uranium was so well decontaminated, that you could handle them in direct contact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Is that right? This may just show my ignorance again; how enriched was it, I suppose --
MR. ENGEL: Okay, well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- percentage?
MR. ENGEL: - for this reactor, we were not concerned with that. We had access to whatever enrichment we wanted --
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, of course.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we operated the reactor first with depleted uranium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- just to say, "Will it run? Will something terrible happen if we try to heat this stuff up and circulate it?" Everything went well --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- without about one percent by weight of uranium, mostly U-238 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- in the system, and said, "All right, now we want to get into critical operation," and so we put in highly enriched uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: This is basically weapons grade stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: But what happened is it dilutes down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it was about 35 percent U-235 when we were operating.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right. So, it will dilute down from the highly enriched --
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to a much lower enrichment.
MR. ENGEL: That's what it took to make this particular experiment critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: From a chemistry standpoint, it doesn't care if it's 233, 235, 238.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: The chemical behavior is the same.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: The only difference is that with enough U-235, you could have a critical reaction going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly, exactly.
MR. ENGEL: So, this stuff came out, and I think it was sent back up to Ohio and put back into the -- it was so clean; they could put it directly back into the diffusion cascade.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: And then, we loaded up on U-233, and I'm thinking October of '68 is when we went critical with --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- 233.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: And then it operated until December 12, 1969.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. ENGEL: It was shut down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then we --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you stay with the program?
MR. ENGEL: I'm still with the program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: We're still finishing up the analysis of the performance, writing the final reports --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and starting work, and a lot of people were working on the next generation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- "What's it gonna be? How big will it be? What will be its design characteristics?"
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the ultimate goal? I mean what did people look at and say, "Okay, 20 years from now, this is gonna be used for what?"
MR. ENGEL: Generating electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: We're going to build plants that generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity per plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Nuclear power plants, that's what the idea for this was for.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely, and making if not enough uranium on the side to keep it going in the breeding process --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- almost enough --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- so that you had to bring in very little material from outside --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right --
MR. ENGEL: -- to keep it going.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to keep it going. So, let me ask you a question. Today, what are most reactors? What type of reactors, power plant reactors? What are they?
MR. ENGEL: They are solid fuel, zirconium zircaloy clad --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- light water reactor moderated and cooled. That water either boils and makes steam directly, or the hot water is piped to a heat exchanger, which is a steam generator, and then that steam goes to the turbine. The GE concept, the boiling water reactors, are the ones at Fukushima.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: The Westinghouse reactors are the pressurized water reactors --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- principally. There are other people who make these reactors, as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: The French use pressurized water reactors --
MR. MCDANIEL: Do they? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and nearly all of the power reactors in the world are water cooled reactors, light water reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, with fuel cells, I mean I guess fuel rods?
MR. ENGEL: Fuel rods.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fuel rods that go -- right.
MR. ENGEL: These rods are, oh, maybe that diameter --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and in bundles of this many, and the unpleasant property that they have is that the zirconium cladding, when it gets hot, reacts with water and breaks down the water and makes hydrogen --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which then can explode --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. ENGEL: -- and this is the sort of thing that happened at Fukushima --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and made a big mess of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Okay, so the Molten Salt Reactor Program was shut down in '69.
MR. ENGEL: Well, the Reactor was shut down.
MR. MCDANIEL: The Reactor. That's what I mean, the Reactor was shut down.
MR. ENGEL: The program continued with the intent of building another one, and then about February, I think it was, of 1972, word came down from Washington, "This program is shut down."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: "Stop."
MR. MCDANIEL: Stop, just quit.
MR. ENGEL: Quit.
MR. MCDANIEL: How come?
MR. ENGEL: I don't know. I have to be careful here.
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MR. ENGEL: I have no information to answer your question.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I answered that question once with, "I don't know," and it came out sounding like I was puzzled that they would do something so foolish --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I --
MR. ENGEL: -- and I couldn't understand it.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- I understand.
MR. ENGEL: But I have no basis for saying that it was this reason or that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- reason, or anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I understand.
MR. ENGEL: It was a decision that was made in Washington --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so I moved over to the Gas Cooled Reactor Program for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: In the meantime, Senator Baker was active in Washington, and he somehow convinced the people in, I guess was it -- when did DOE come into play? It was either '66 or '76 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I'm --
MR. ENGEL: -- and I'm thinking '76.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- was it '76? Okay. I don't know.
MR. ENGEL: But either one, he convinced them that this program ought to be restarted --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that it would be restarted and funding would be assured until you've finished a successful program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: That lasted two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, not hardly enough time to get going.
MR. ENGEL: Well, we did accomplish a few things in that time related to the program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- that were, I think, important. But then, in 1976, they said, "Quit. You're done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were some other studies that went on beyond that until about 1980 on -- well, one of them was the -- get the title right -- the Non-Proliferating Alternative Systems Assessments Program --
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- NASAP --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they looked at half a dozen concepts for systems that would be more proliferation-resistant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- than the uranium plutonium fast breeder system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one that was considered was a molten salt system, and so we worked on a couple of concepts that we thought looked really pretty good, and wrote reports on those and these things went into various evaluations and got, essentially, ignored.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly. So, this was mid '70s, by this time.
MR. ENGEL: Late '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Late '70s. Now, what about the Clinch River Breeder Reactor? Now, tell me about that.
MR. ENGEL: I can tell you very little about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and what time was that going on?
MR. ENGEL: It was going on at about the same time, in the early '70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, there were some people that left this program and went up to Chicago to work on the Breeder in the mid to late '60s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Now, I am terrible with dates and I can't tell you when the Clinch River Breeder was stopped --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- because that was, "Them other guys."
MR. MCDANIEL: That was those other guys. That was those other guys. I understand. All right, so they stopped your program, and then what did you do?
MR. ENGEL: Well, then I was out of a job, in a sense, except that there was a need in the fossil energy program for somebody to work with the director of that program tracking the technical aspects of the program, so I became a technical assistant in that program for three or four years. That started in 1980 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then, the fellow who was Technical Assistant to Murray Rosenthal decided he was going to leave. Murray wanted a Technical Assistant, and he tapped me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did Murray Rosenthal -- what was his title?
MR. ENGEL: He was then Associate Director for -- what was the official title? I can't give you the official title, but he was concerned with the reactor programs, the fusion energy program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- the engineering technology programs at the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: He was in that job, Chet Richmond was in the Biological Sciences, Alex Zucker was in the Physical Sciences --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I think Clyde Hopkins may have been operations --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he?
MR. ENGEL: -- at that time, but it was in that general timeframe --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then, subsequently, when Trivelpiece came on as Director of the Laboratory, Murray moved to Deputy Director --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I became Technical Assistant to the Deputy Director.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I just moved with him to another office --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly, exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and that lasted until I retired in 1991.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: I left in April of '91. I told Murray, "I think it's time for me to leave," and he said, "Well, you gotta wait until I get somebody to take your place."
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you say, "I can have somebody in here tomorrow"?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I had no voice in whom he --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- selected.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: He made a very good choice, I agree with the man who took the job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, you retired in '91.
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and so what have you been doing the last 20 years?
MR. ENGEL: Well, one of the things that came up is when we left the MSRE, we were told, "You've got to leave. Just leave it where it is. We think it's safe." Well, it wasn't all that stable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: It was not dangerous, but it wasn't stable, and so they decided at some point, "We've had some of this uranium moving around in the system. We don't know where it's going, what's happening; we need to look at it." So, for about four or five years, ORNL was involved in going back to the MSRE, seeing what's there, what has happened, and what are we going to do about it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: They asked me to come in on a consulting basis, which I did off and on over a period of four or five years --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- looking at that system and trying to figure out what to do, and so on, and then, at some point, Bechtel Jacobs came in as a remediation contractor --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and activities at the Laboratory were split between remediation programs and ongoing programs --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and Bechtel Jacobs got the remediation part --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so they took over fixing the MSRE, or cleaning up what was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they apparently had no interest in me. I've never heard from them --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well ...
MR. ENGEL: -- and I think they have certainly spent a great deal of money.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I have some misgivings about how effectively they have spent that money --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- but I'm not involved.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Well, let's go back, and I guess since after that, you've just been enjoying retirement, haven't you?
MR. ENGEL: Oh, I've been invited here and there to talk about Molten Salt Technology. I spent a week in Korea, spent a week in the Czech Republic, went up to Schenectady with a colleague to give a two-day symposium on Molten Salt Technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, is it still a vital, I mean, you know --
MR. ENGEL: It is just within the last I would say year or so garnered a lot of interest around the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? And why is that?
MR. ENGEL: Well, part of it comes, I think, and this is personal opinion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, that's fine.
MR. ENGEL: -- that China has become interested, and the reason I think that China is interested is that they recognize that they've got to have all of the production capability that they can develop --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- from whatever source or in whatever form --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- whether it's fission technology from the uranium plutonium cycle, fission technology from the U-233 thorium system, solar, wind, fusion; they're chasing them all down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they have an interest in molten salt technology, and, as I understand it, and I have no direct knowledge of their program, they have a fairly ambitious program going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: India has always been interested because of their monazite sand thorium resource.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: I've been in contact with a fellow from New York, who made a fortune in a totally unrelated business, who has decided that he's going to build molten salt reactors and install them in South Africa, relatively small systems, 500-megawatts and down, close to the load centers, where they don't have a nationwide distribution network for electricity --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so you build the reactor near the load center. He has very ambitious plans --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and at one point made contact. I have not heard from him for several months. But the one I heard from most recently is an outfit from Norway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- working through a fellow in Ottawa, Canada, who has invented a revolutionary approach to the U-233 Thorium Breeding System --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I get e-mails back and forth from these various people about this and, "What do you think of this?"
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you're probably one of the very few people in the world that is the molten salt guy, aren't you?
MR. ENGEL: Well, I've been told that. In fact, and I know he said it in jest but Alvin Weinberg said, "You ought to be able to get $5,000.00 a day for your services."
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. ENGEL: Nobody has offered me that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, I understand. I understand. I understand. All right, well let's go back and tell me about when you got married and something, just for a few minutes, about your life here in Oak Ridge --
MR. ENGEL: Okay, well --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- outside of work.
MR. ENGEL: -- I am not an extremely social person.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I'm sort of private and quiet, but through the Methodist Church, as a matter of fact, back in the early '50s, there were a lot of single people in Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one of the places they gathered was a young adult program at First Methodist Church --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they met, as I recall, weekly or monthly or something, just to socialize --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. ENGEL: -- and it didn't matter what church you came from. I was not in the Methodist Church at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But anyway, through that program, I met this young woman, and several other people met other people in that. In fact, the year we got married, there were like a dozen weddings of people who had met through that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Through that group.
MR. ENGEL: -- group program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and some of them are still in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, your wife, you told me when I first got here that she's from Tennessee.
MR. ENGEL: She's Middle Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: She's from a very small town in Middle Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did she end up in Oak Ridge?
MR. ENGEL: Well, one of the people, who I think he must have been in personnel at Y-12, was from the same county.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: What was his name? Tallmadge Cantrell. He somehow got into Oak Ridge, and my wife was working at a bank in Middle Tennessee, her sister was working there, and he knew my wife's family --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and said, "You know, there are good opportunities for well-paying jobs in Oak Ridge," and so Lorraine's sister moved at some point to Oak Ridge, and Lorraine and that sister were very close, and so a year or so later, Lorraine moved to Oak Ridge, and this was, I think -- it must have been '55 or '56.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: But anyway, we met through this group at First Methodist Church, and things evolved from there, and Lorraine's sister got married in late 1958 to a fellow she had met through this program --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and, at some point, we had decided we would be married sometime the next year. Well, about that time, this inquiry came up, "Can we send somebody to Berlin?" --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I said, "Yeah, I'd like to go, but I'm in the process of trying to get married. When is this going to happen?" "Well, we don't know."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: "When we get all the paperwork done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: So, we went ahead and had wedding plans going to be married in her home church in Middle Tennessee. Well, do we wait and not get married? Do we have the wedding early so that we'll be available? Well, it turns out thing stretched out enough, so we were married May 17, and then about July 10 -- no, it was later than that. It was about the 14th of July, I got the message, "You should be in Berlin next Monday."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. There you go, so that worked out fine. That worked out okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, we were newly married, and of course Lorraine spoke no German --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and back then, while a lot of people in Berlin spoke English, the man in the street did not speak English.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: The shopkeeper in the butcher shop, or the dry goods or the bakery or the stationery store didn't speak English --
MR. MCDANIEL: Didn't speak English.
MR. ENGEL: -- so she got dropped in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did she learn pretty well, pretty fast?
MR. ENGEL: She managed to get along without really learning all that much German.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: We made a few friends in the Military, but we didn't have access to the PX. All of our living was done, as the Military people said, on the economy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: We shopped in the local stores, she got her hair done at the local hairdressers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, was that a Military base where you were living?
MR. ENGEL: Oh no, it was a private home.
MR. MCDANIEL: A private home, okay. I see.
MR. ENGEL: We were renting space. This fellow, he was a physician, his wife was also a physician, they had built a house California style but to Berlin standards.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: There were two levels. The main level was the head of the house, and then the tradition was you had an upper level where one of your children lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: -- and when the old couple got too infirm, they moved upstairs and the children took over the main residence.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: Well, these people, the upper level was not vacant. It was occupied by somebody who was associated with the U.S. Government in some way, and I never knew exactly what his job was, but I think it was CIA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: I don't know that for a fact.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: He spoke excellent English and German, and his wife was German.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: But they were moving out --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and said, "Okay, when they move out, you can move into this upstairs apartment."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Well, things kind of stretched on. We were staying in a - a sort of hotel, boardinghouse arrangement --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and they said, "Well, we're not sure when those guys are gonna move out. We are going to move to Spain. We customarily go to Spain, and this is fall approaching, cold weather." So, the couple, both of whom are physicians --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- said, "We'll just leave and you can take our apartment downstairs until such time as the people upstairs move out," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and so we did. Had a very nice home. By German standards at the time, fairly expensive, but by U.S. standards, very reasonably priced --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- because the exchange rate, which is now roughly a dollar per mark, was 4.2 marks for a dollar.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: So, my salary came out and they reimbursed the Lab for my U.S. salary.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see.
MR. ENGEL: So, I'm living on U.S. dollars in an economy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Four times.
MR. ENGEL: -- four times.
MR. MCDANIEL: Four times. Exactly, so it was like living in the U.S. three-quarters cheaper, something like that.
MR. ENGEL: Oh yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you spent the year there, and then you came back --
MR. ENGEL: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- here, and then ...
MR. ENGEL: On the way back, somehow -- well, Lorraine was pregnant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: I'm not sure how that happened.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go, so she was pregnant. By the time you came back, she was pregnant.
MR. ENGEL: Right --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and she was about a month away, and we had very good medical care in Germany, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: We said, "That's no problem." Well, we were flying through London, took a day to do some sightseeing in London --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- which was a mistake --
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. ENGEL: -- because our son managed to get born overnight, well, at 7:00 in the morning, while we were --
MR. MCDANIEL: In London?
MR. ENGEL: -- in London.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. ENGEL: He was premature --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- by four weeks, but healthy --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and the pediatrician said, "You can't take him out of the country for at least two weeks."
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. ENGEL: So, we stayed in London for two weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what would that make him, citizenship-wise?
MR. ENGEL: Dual.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, dual citizenship.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. ENGEL: I went to the U.S. embassy, got him registered as a U.S. citizen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: Since he was born in England, he is automatically a British citizen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: Back then, Britain did not recognize photocopying, so I have three or four handwritten copies of his British birth certificate --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and one from the U.S. embassy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, you stayed there for two weeks, and then you came back.
MR. ENGEL: Now there's one interesting feature I have to throw in here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: That two weeks happened to start one week before Princess Margaret got married in London --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and extended to one week --
MR. MCDANIEL: After.
MR. ENGEL: -- after so we were there through all the chaos and confusion --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- of the royal wedding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, and what year was that? That was --
MR. ENGEL: 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 1960. Okay. All right. But when you came back, you came back and you found a place to live.
MR. ENGEL: Yeah, we lived in a garden apartment then --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. ENGEL: -- one of the two-bedroom garden apartments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and then did you have other children?
MR. ENGEL: We had a daughter --
MR. MCDANIEL: Had a daughter.
MR. ENGEL: -- who was born a year and a half later. But, after we got back, one of the first things we did was set out to build this house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we moved in in November of 1961.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, in this house?
MR. ENGEL: In this house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- which we had custom built for us by a couple of builders who did a very nice job, we thought --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and we have not felt impelled to move into a bigger and grander house --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- so we just stayed here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure, of course, of course.
MR. ENGEL: But, as I said, we moved in in November, and Teresa was born the following February.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, your kids, they went through the school system.
MR. ENGEL: Right, they went through the Oak Ridge school system. Our son went to MTSU, got a BA and an MBA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: Played trombone throughout the time he was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. ENGEL: -- and then went to work in the Nashville area --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and has been in that area ever since. He married a young woman whose background is from Columbia, Tennessee --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and she's with one of the big banking systems in Nashville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: And our daughter went to Virginia Tech for her bachelor's degree. We said, "Well, if you can get enough scholarships to pay for the difference between going in-state and out-of-state," --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- well, she got a presidential scholarship --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's pretty good.
MR. ENGEL: -- which paid her expenses, and then she moved on to Kentucky for a master's degree in mathematics. She started out chemical engineering and decided she didn't like that, she was going to do mathematics --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then went on to a PhD, and is now living in upstate New York teaching math at Ithaca College.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. ENGEL: She and colleagues have written a couple of textbooks --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- for college math purposes, and they have two boys who are now 13 and 10. Richard has two children, a son and a daughter, 21 and 18, who are now both at UT.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Well, that's handy.
MR. ENGEL: Except we never see them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah, of course not. They're college students. I want to take about three or four more minutes. Now, you said you weren't very social. Has that changed over the years?
MR. ENGEL: Well, my wife is a very social person.
MR. MCDANIEL: She's social enough for both of you, is that --
MR. ENGEL: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- what you're saying?
MR. ENGEL: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. I understand. So, were you involved in the community activities, or was there anything particular that you were --
MR. ENGEL: To some extent. Lorraine is very active in the Oak Ridge Woman's Club --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. ENGEL: -- and has been forever, practically. I don't know when she got started in that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I've been involved in various technical organizations: the American Nuclear Society, the Tau Beta Pi, which is the engineering honorary. I was an alumnus, or I am. I maintain my alumnus status in that, but I'm not active --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and then the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I had delivered a number of papers at ANS meetings -- American Nuclear Society --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. ENGEL: -- during my work at the Lab, so I've maintained an interest in that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. ENGEL: -- and I'm sure you're familiar with ORICL. [Note: Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yes. Yes, absolutely.
MR. ENGEL: We're both active in ORICL, and I serve on the Board of Directors there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. All right, which to me is just a great program. I mean it's a fantastic program.
MR. ENGEL: And I help out with their technical support, to some degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. Well, good. Well, thanks so much for taking time to talk, and --
MR. ENGEL: Well, as I said, it's my pleasure. I'm sorry my voice is so weak.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay. That's all right. It worked out just fine. That's what we have these microphones for. So, thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
MR. ENGEL: Well, as I say, it was my pleasure. I didn't think we'd find very much to talk about, but we managed to kill --
MR. MCDANIEL: We've been going for about 100 minutes. Well, thank you.
[End of Interview]